Understanding ChatGPT Work
simonwillison.net62 points by gmays 2 hours ago
62 points by gmays 2 hours ago
ChatGPT work usage counts toward Codex entitlement
Some people have an agent-driven browser that controls the ChatGPT web UI and exposes it as a chat view in a custom harness or pi for normal chats (with image generation, file input capability).
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 saved in the folder", it just asks for the relevant info and handles the rest. It opens its internal web browser and programmatically fills out the forms.
It gets the task done in 5-10 minutes. It's it bit slow since I'm not paying extra for ultrafast mode, but it gets the job done. Frees up the brain to do other tasks.
It's exactly like vibe coding but for computer tasks.
> "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files saved in the folder"
It's both awesome and scary at the same time to realising that most AI these days can work on something like this that's official and tedious, and probably not screw up too much (or do better at it than some people with fat fingers).
Less bureaucracy should be the focus of AI marketing, rather than global superintelligent robots or smut generation
Bureaucracy is a major part of many corporate leader’s roles. That might not be the best sales line
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 around mobile access.
Claude Code makes this trivial /rc and you are done.
Codex requires you run the desktop app and additional authentication requirements. The result of this has been codex is almost always relegated to fleet worker rather than orchestrator.
I wonder if the emphasis on this work feature has something to do w the persistent hurdles to remote control if codex sessions.
Maybe for the occasional something. If I had an actual workflow i'd prefer a dedicated tool over the newest chatgpt "do everything" app.
agreed on the notion that
> people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex
just in general. I find it to be far superior (imo) for all tasks atm. Claude just overdoes things in writing, coding, architecture, etc
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
I became a pelican fan, thanks to Simon. Looks like Simon keeps thinking about pelicans each time he prompts to any LLM. :)
Great article. I will add that Extra High and Pro levels of work are available in ChatGPT for Teams ($25 USD/seat, min 2 seats); not just the $100+ tier.
Not for long. Too late to get Business now to exploit this, since EH and the small credit-free Pro allowance will soon be restricted to Premium Seats ($100/m).
There is more to the browser, it can give you a remote desktop access to the browser.
So it's not completely headless.
But when I tried it, the remote control completely froze after a few seconds.
Understanding ChatGpt Retirement
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Work is for heavy work that runs in the background. It can make a hundred slide deck for me with speaker notes and visual verification of each slide, all without breaking a sweat. See my gist ac89399e688ab5c85ad021f091606e36 for the skill.
The things it can't do is use the embedding or TTS models as a part of its quota. It also cannot read a video.
> I believe ChatGPT Work sessions are billed against your Codex allowance, while ChatGPT Chat Sessions get their own, separate allowance. This may help explain the model availability differences
That's correct, and also why ChatGPT Work is DOA for me personally.
I need 100% of my Codex budget for Codex.
Too bad, it would have been nice to have a few extra features for the chat interface.
If we voice this opinion publicly, the most likely end result is that OpenAI will start billing our chat sessioms against our Codex budget too.
I thought they just did this? People were using some loophole to use their Chat sessions to power their Codex usage after their Codex quotas had run out.
No, it's still separate. I don't know what that exploit was though, so possibly they just patched that.
Similarly, I use my budget with Shelley on exe.dev. But it seems nice that as far as I can tell, for ChatGPT usage, coding agents compete on a level footing.
I still might try ChatGPT Work sometime if there was some feature I couldn't get from Shelley.
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The bots see a simonwillison.net post, the bots upvote. ffs.
If it makes you feel any better, I have just upvoted every submission made by your account.