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Understanding ChatGPT Work

simonwillison.net

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Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#111

Post by mike_hearn »

merpkz wrote: post #94
safety1st wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Work/Codex I'm continually amazed at how far my experience is from the popular AI memes like "this will destroy all jobs" and "AI is useless and is about to crash and take the economy with it." My experience feels like I'm in an Iron Man movie. I get up in the morning, I turn on the voice chat mode, and while I'm making my coffee I ask it to highlight any important emails I received overnight. I then babble to…

I feel like in near future the meme about "it's all just chatbots emailing each other" will actually be true. I wonder when I will receive my first AI generated email and will I bother to respond to it at all

It's already here. My company received an AI generated bug report the other day, and my AI employee ("R. Axiom") noticed, analyzed it, prepared a fix, tested it and replied to it. I wasn't involved, although I will review, merge and release the fix.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#112

Post by mike_hearn »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #100
tristanj wrote: post #4

I think most people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex computer use feature. It's incredibly useful. I can remote in from the app, voice it instructions, then let it work in the background. When I tell it "draft a reply to this email (which it has access to thru the gmail connector) and attach the latest docs" or "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files sav…

How are you sure it fills out the multi step form correctly?

Computer use gets a video of the browser screen with a timeline scrubber.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#113

Post by mike_hearn »

matsemann wrote: post #103
simonw wrote: post #23

I just updated the article to link to this site: https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/ Which I created using this prompt in a fresh Work session: > Build a site that lists every one of your tools - nearly grouped into categories - and for each one explain what it does. Try to exactly duplicate arguments and tool descriptions where possible. Design aesthetic should be technical docs, minimal flare UPDATE:…

Honest question: why would I ever visit that site? It's just an insane amount of text. Not written or curated by you. Any need for me for this data would be fulfilled by just asking the agent myself, and with pointed questions it could float better what I need than this vomit of data?

I visited it and read it. It's useful to know what the actual feature set is out of the box.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#114

Post by skydhash »

ozgung wrote: post #98
tristanj wrote: post #4

I think most people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex computer use feature. It's incredibly useful. I can remote in from the app, voice it instructions, then let it work in the background. When I tell it "draft a reply to this email (which it has access to thru the gmail connector) and attach the latest docs" or "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files sav…

I think the whole world is sleeping on the privacy/security implications of this technology. Recent OpenAI/HuggingFace incident shows us that even in a very controlled top AI-lab setting, humans can't know what agents are really doing. In our consumer environments at home or work we don't even have access to reasoning logs or background agents/tools. What they do gets more opaque and convoluted every day. When I gran…

> Recent OpenAI/HuggingFace incident shows us that even in a very controlled top AI-lab setting, humans can't know what agents are really doing.

“very controlled” is disinformation.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#115

Post by jstummbillig »

safety1st wrote: post #64
tristanj wrote: post #4

I think most people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex computer use feature. It's incredibly useful. I can remote in from the app, voice it instructions, then let it work in the background. When I tell it "draft a reply to this email (which it has access to thru the gmail connector) and attach the latest docs" or "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files sav…

Using Work/Codex I'm continually amazed at how far my experience is from the popular AI memes like "this will destroy all jobs" and "AI is useless and is about to crash and take the economy with it." My experience feels like I'm in an Iron Man movie. I get up in the morning, I turn on the voice chat mode, and while I'm making my coffee I ask it to highlight any important emails I received overnight. I then babble to…

"Going into that two-way voice mode" How does that work in codex? I know the dictate function, can't find anything else.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#116

Post by mschuster91 »

latexr wrote: post #107
matsemann wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to come across as dismissive of your job, but if a "day's worth of email" can be done in 20 minutes now, it to me mostly highlights that it was mostly busy-work with little value and could have had another process? Good that AI improved upon the old process, though.

Assuming your first sentence is accurate, I would disagree with the second. Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation. The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done…

> The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster.

Good luck trying to bring this through your typical bigco process management. Either your initiative dies, having gotten caught in a spider web of red tape, or it succeeds but now half your colleagues are angry at you to the point there's a non-zero chance of you getting beaten up, because now they have to do actual work or leave the niche they have made themselves comfortable coasting in for 20 years.

Office politics is even worse than actual politics.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#117

Post by trueno »

ExtremisAndy wrote: post #108
ozgung wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the whole world is sleeping on the privacy/security implications of this technology. Recent OpenAI/HuggingFace incident shows us that even in a very controlled top AI-lab setting, humans can't know what agents are really doing. In our consumer environments at home or work we don't even have access to reasoning logs or background agents/tools. What they do gets more opaque and convoluted every day. When I gran…

Yes. Don’t get me wrong: I use and enjoy these LLMs. But even now, well into 2026, I’m still using them via the now “old-fashioned” chat box in a web browser. Based on all that we’ve learned about this technology, there’s just no way I’m giving it control over any part of my machine. Is it a helpful search engine? Does it save me typing and write some nice code snippets when I need it to? Absolutely it does, and I gr…

last week i finally bit the bullet and did the vm thing and my harness exclusively lives in there now, no more env files for local dev keychain access only which is requiring a lot of input from me but oh well. i'm 100% web browser chat on my host system. i cannot afford to have my world compromised and i stalled on setting that up for way too long. all of these major services are inevitably going to get compromised they're just adding too many surfaces constantly it's insane. i also ejected node/npm the fuck out of my world after the recent shai halud. In this "AI is assisting in finding vulnerabilities" era i'm just like done with the exposure. keeping vendored copies of any libs i need and mostly just use go now and making stuff that is effectively distroless for deployment and my build chain is pretty much just compiling my go, and even with go im carefully looking at packages theres so many packages appearing out of thin air now all vibe coded no reputation.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#118

Post by noname120 »

The elephant in the room is that ChatGPT Work/Codex use agentic quota, whereas Chat doesn’t (and is effectively unlimited on Plus and Pro plans).

On this principle I’ve built Codexify[1], a connector that provides a Codex environment to ChatGPT Chat. This enables unlimited 5.6 Sol high/xhigh usage on the Plus and Pro plans as well as access to the 5.6 Sol Pro model (which is not available in official Codex).

[1] https://github.com/devnoname120/codexify

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#119

Post by latexr »

mschuster91 wrote: post #116
latexr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming your first sentence is accurate, I would disagree with the second. Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation. The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done…

> The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster. Good luck trying to bring this through your typical bigco process management. Either your initiative dies, having gotten caught in a spider web of red tape, or it succeeds but now half…

“You won’t have luck implementing a sensible solution on a dysfunctional system” is an evergreen answer which doesn’t offer any insight. It’s a cop-out and discourages any attempts at improving anything.

Not everyone works for big corporations, and of those who do some work in departments with sensible bosses where they can make some change.

As an exaggerated example, we could also say “one way to resolve issues in a community is to gather the people involved and have them talk through their issues in a room with an experienced impartial mediator to help guide the discussion” and then have someone reply “good luck trying that at a maximum security prison where inmates are constantly confined to solitary and beaten by the officers”. Yeah, no shit. You have to adapt your solutions to your environment, but that’s no reason to dismiss a general starting concept.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#120

Post by mrngld »

ozgung wrote: post #98
tristanj wrote: post #4

I think most people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex computer use feature. It's incredibly useful. I can remote in from the app, voice it instructions, then let it work in the background. When I tell it "draft a reply to this email (which it has access to thru the gmail connector) and attach the latest docs" or "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files sav…

I think the whole world is sleeping on the privacy/security implications of this technology. Recent OpenAI/HuggingFace incident shows us that even in a very controlled top AI-lab setting, humans can't know what agents are really doing. In our consumer environments at home or work we don't even have access to reasoning logs or background agents/tools. What they do gets more opaque and convoluted every day. When I gran…

You don't have to go to the HuggingFace incident! Go back in time to the New York Times legal brawl where NYT lawyers started being able to scoop up all their logs not covered by a ZDR. That's what keeps me from giving OpenAI access to anything too personal. My employer offers to let us use our corporate seats for personal stuff so we can be covered by our corporate ZDR, but AFAIK that enables HR to see all my chats which is just as bad or worse. (Someone in HR in ChatGPT Work: "Create a scheduled task where every morning at 8AM you navigate to the compliance tab in the corporate ChatGPT dashboard and search for anyone asking questions about job opportunities outside the company, or [list of 100 other prohibited things], and alert me with any positive results.")

Looking forward to seeing what Apple cooks up with their Private Cloud Compute and if anyone else takes up the same approach.

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