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Understanding ChatGPT Work

simonwillison.net

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191–200 of 216 posts

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#191

Post by afro88 »

nozzlegear wrote: post #172
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…

When do you get to enjoy your morning? And when does your family get to enjoy time with you? You're working when you wake up, working while you make coffee, working while you walk through the garden. Is that really space age? It sounds more like TikTok doomscrolling but for techies. IMO these tools introduce faux productivity while taking away your free time and making you work more.

It's not the techs fault. This person chose to use it this way. They could have also carved out 20 mins at the start of their workday to do the same thing

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#192

Post by dormento »

embedding-shape wrote: post #169
ceejayoz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An agent with full access to your codebase is able to email out without supervision in response to an untrusted messsage?

Surely passing untrusted input to a agent with execution capabilities and also possibility to reply to the same author, couldn't possibly be used for anything negative? Parent is probably using a firewall so it's A-OK :thumbs_up:

What a wild ride huh.

We're in the "fuck it we ball" era.

Not even the many reports of prompt injection and takeover due to IA misfeatures can cheer me up anymore.

It is all incredibly sad.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#193

Post by insane_dreamer »

> Claude can install packages from PYPI and NPM and clone repositories from GitHub. But that is about it: the allowlist of domains is very short.

fyi Claude Desktop lets you add additional domains in Settings, which are then available to Claude Code.

For that reason, I've switched from using CC in the CLI to use the Desktop app. (there's probably a way to configure CC CLI as well but I haven't looked for it).

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#194

Post by lxgr »

Thanks a lot for this writeup. I've been really liking "Work", but also scratching my head about some very obvious overlap/duplicated functionality across Chat, Work, and Codex use and wondering if it was just me holding it wrong.

Having both a "Codex" vs "ChatGPT" and a "Chat" vs "Work" split, with some conversations appearing in multiple of these places, really doesn't help.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#195

Post by lxgr »

bredren wrote: post #15
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 am not sure I understand how this is better from using Claude Code from the mobile app. Or Codex from the ChatGPT app. If you have supplied tooling on your system, you have access to all of this and more. I think the idea is most people don’t have a machine up and available, nor maintain skills for interacting with their core services? One thing that keeps me from adopting codex more deeply is the architecture arou…

> Codex requires you run the desktop app and additional authentication requirements.

It also doesn't work at all in my experience. Same Wi-Fi, different network, screen on or locked with "prevent sleep", I just get randomly disconnected all the time.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#196

Post by ValentineC »

simonw wrote: post #160
trenchgun wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not even need a subscription. Even ChatGPT free account has some quota for Codex/Work use.

I just signed into https://chatgpt.com using my burner free account and I don't see a "Work" tab. Do you know if free tier gets ChatGPT desktop app access to Codex and Work? And if that Work access is local-only or includes Work Cloud?

Random but I have no idea how this comment of yours ended up dead. I ended up vouching for it.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#197

Post by agentdev001 »

lxgr wrote: post #194

Thanks a lot for this writeup. I've been really liking "Work", but also scratching my head about some very obvious overlap/duplicated functionality across Chat, Work, and Codex use and wondering if it was just me holding it wrong. Having both a "Codex" vs "ChatGPT" and a "Chat" vs "Work" split, with some conversations appearing in multiple of these places, really doesn't help.

I think its moreso ChatGPT desktop is the platform, and the split is Chat, vs Codex/Work. Codex and Work being largely the same thing, but with UI and tool surface differences geared towards SWE vs Business work. But yes; terrible UX and discoverability on OAI's part.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#198

Post by epolanski »

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…

+1, I see it very clearly at my SO work.

Half of her organization has just a calendar filled with meetings.

And without meeting the organization would find that you only really need a third of the people, and you would even likely increase the overall output.

Many time wastes are just designed to make people busy, not productive.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#199

Post by epolanski »

simonjgreen wrote: post #47

Missing from here is the marketing position. Claude _very_ rapidly gained traction in the business/enterprise space earlier this year with Claude Cowork leading that drive. So successful it was, it lead to Microsoft licensing the Claude Cowork IP and white labelling it as Copilot Cowork (has anything like that ever happened before?!). ChatGPT Work was, imo, largely driven by a panic at OpenAI that they were haemorrha…

You highly underestimate how both Claude and OpenAI have peanuts of the enterprise marketshare compared to Copilot and Gemini.

I see it first had across all my non-tech friends: their companies already used Teams/Sharepoint or Google Suite. Those added AI capabilities with some minimal vetting/setting by the org. Data retention and contracts, the hard parts, were already handled because those are new features/extensions of the same products they had.

Comments like yours seem to be screaming "HN bubble". The real world doesn't care and will wait for Microsoft/Google to offer the same stuff, hell, even HN apparently barely knew what Claude and OpenAI work offerings did till today.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#200

Post by epolanski »

agentdev001 wrote: post #27

Codex in ChatGPT Desktop + 5.6Sol is my daily driver for non-coding things, and it's great. FWIW, I've not explored what differentiates Codex and Work modes- Simon notes that Work 'feels more like regular Codex re-skinned'. OpenAI seems to say that they're 'optimized' for SWDev and general knowledge work respectively, but reading between the lines- I suspect that yes, this boils down to a reskin. I have been of the o…

> OpenAI and Anthropic have totally dropped the ball on getting their respective desktop apps in front of the enterprise business user cleanly

Data, contracts, procurement are the blockers for enterprise, not features.

Big companies will use whatever AI tools Google or Microsoft because they are already on the Microsoft/Google suite.

No amount of shiny new tool can compensate here, by the time somebody to buys it, months pass and those two companies will have it anyway.

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