thank you for sharing, is there a new container for each code run, or it stays the same for whole conversation?
It’s maintained for the conversation. You can ask it for details like this.
ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
231–240 of 336 posts
Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found it's terrible at digesting a few codebases I've needed to deal with (to wit, 2007-era C# which used lots of libraries which were popular then, and 1993-era Visual Basic which also used from third party library that no LLM seems to understand the first thing about).
I had great results recently with ~22 year old PHP: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/1/mid-2000s/ It even guessed the vintage correctly! > This appears to be a custom template system from the mid-2000s era, designed to separate presentation logic from PHP code while maintaining database connectivity for dynamic content generation.
That's great. Just yesterday I spoke with a developer who refutes Rector on old codebases, instead having an LLM simply refactor his PHP 5.6 to 8.(3 I think). He doesn't even check in Rector anymore. These are all bespoke business scripts that his team have been nursing for two decades. He even updated the Codeigniter framework it's all running on.
Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
#233I wonder how long npm/pip etc even makes sense. Dependancies introduce unnecessary LOC and features which are, more and more, just written by LLMs themselves. It is easier to just write the necessary functionality directly. Whether that is more maintainable or not is a bit YMMV at this stage, but I would wager it is improving.
Interesting thought (I think recently more than ever it's a good idea to question assumptions) - but IMO abstractions are important as ever. Maybe the smallest/most convenient packages (looking at you is-even) are obsolete, but meaningful packages still abstract a lot of complexity that IMO aren't easier to one-shot with an LLM
Concretely, when you use Django, underneath you have CPython, then C, then assembly, and finally machine code. I believe LLMs have been much better trained on each layer than going end-to-end.
Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
#234Giving agents linux has compounding benefits in our experience. They're able to sort through weirdness that normal tooling wouldn't allow. Like they can read and image, get an error back from the API and see it wasn't the expected format. They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly.
Matches my experience with print-on-demand workflows. I tried using vision models to validate things like ICC profiles and total ink density, but they usually just hallucinate that the file is compliant. I ended up giving the agent access to ImageMagick to run analysis directly. It’s the only reliable way to catch issues before sending files to fulfillment, otherwise you end up eating the cost of failed prints.
Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
#235Not sure if this is still working. I tried getting it to install cowsay and it ran into authentication issues. Does it work for other people?
I could even get it to download the ruby cowsay gem from rubygems and run it with some provided text. An alternative is to attach the gem to the conversation or provide a publicly available url.
Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
#236Did I miss the boat on chatgpt? Is there something more to it than the web chat interface? I jumped on the Claude Code bandwagon and I dropped off chatgpt. I find the chatgpt voice interface to be infuriating; it literally talks in circles and just spews summary garbage whenever I ask it anything remotely specific.
Chatgpt recently added additional personalization options that have made their voice chat better for me. I want a direct professional, no “hey” there I’m your bro fake stuff etc. See personalization under settings.
Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might work! You would have to figure out how to get Whisper working in there but I'm sure that's possible with a bit of creativity concerning uploading files and maybe running a build with the available C compiler. It appears to have 4GB of RAM and 56 (!?) CPU cores https://chatgpt.com/share/6977e1f8-0f94-8006-9973-e9fab6d244...
Huh... If people are getting this for free or even as an offering with chatgpt consideirng it becomes subsidized too. Lowend providers are a little in threat with their 7$/year deals if Chatgpt provides 56 cores for free. this doesn't seem right to provide so many cores for (free??) Are you running this in your free account as you mention in blog post simon or in your paid account?
You are likely just seeing the host topology. Even if the container reports 56 cores, the actual compute is almost certainly throttled via cgroups to keep the unit economics viable. I would be surprised if you can sustain more than a fraction of a vCPU before hitting a hard quota.
Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
#238I wonder how long npm/pip etc even makes sense. Dependancies introduce unnecessary LOC and features which are, more and more, just written by LLMs themselves. It is easier to just write the necessary functionality directly. Whether that is more maintainable or not is a bit YMMV at this stage, but I would wager it is improving.
The most popular modules downloaded off pip and npm are not singular simple functions and cannot easily be rewritten by an llm.
Scikit-learn
Pandas
Polars
Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Backend has always been easier than frontend. AI has made backend absolutely trivial, the code only has to work on one type of machine in one environment. If you think it's rare or will remain rare you're just not being exposed to it, because it's on the backend.
Might be a surprise to you, but some backends are more than just a Nextjs endpoint that calls a database.
No surprise at all and I'd challenge you to find any backend task that LLMs don't improve working on as much they do frontend. And ignoring that the parent comment here is just ignorant since they're talking about the web like it's still 2002. I've worked professionally at every possible layer here and unless you are literally at the leading edge, SOTA, laying track as you go, backend is dramatically easier than anything that has to run in front of users. You can tolerate latency, delays and failures on the backend that real users will riot about if it happens in front of them. The frontend performance envelope starts where the backend leaves off. It does not matter in the slightest how fast your cluster of beefy identical colocated machines does anything at all if it takes more than 100ms to do anything that the user directly cares about, on their shitty browser on a shitty machine on tethered to their phone in the mountains, and the difference is trivially measurable by people who don't work in our field, so the bar is higher.
Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might be a surprise to you, but some backends are more than just a Nextjs endpoint that calls a database.
Honestly, I am also at a faang working on a tier 0 distributed system in infra and the amount of AI generated code that is shipped on this service is probably like 40%+ at this point.
I'm not surprised at all here, last time I worked in a FAANG there was an enormous amount of boilerplate (e.g. Spring), and it almost makes me weep for lost time to think how easy some of that would be now.