But what happened to ChatGPT? Where am I supposed to casually chat?
Also, when you toggle btween ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Codex, nothing changes. This is super confusing. Can someone from the OpenAI team clarify the difference btwn the modes? Does chatgpt work have more business-y related plugins turned on by default?
Edit: So it seems like the only place you can actually chat with chatgpt is in an awkward homeless nested window. idk. The chatgpt interface wasn't great (desperately needed artifacts), but I still used it a lot. I can't see this change going well with a lot of the casual users.
Edit2: In their awkward homeless nested chat mode, you cannot even edit past messages. this is a mess, why was the team so zealous to pull the switch on unification in this state? guessing there was internal pressure to juice codex's growth but, based on what im seeing, they did it by torching chatgpt?
Edit 3: Ok so it seems like ChatGPT is still around, but renamed to "ChatGPT Classic". Seems like it wont be long for this world because there's no place to download ChatGPT Classic should you choose to uninstall it. The dmg at https://chatgpt.com/download/ only contains the new ChatGPT.
But it seems to be fixed now.
Also, subtitling Work with "For getting work done" and Codex with "For developers" is a bit aggressive towards developers ;)
1) If you have the Codex desktop app installed, and you update from within the app, it replaces itself with the new chat-demoted-to-an-overlay app called "ChatGPT" and renames your existing ChatGPT app to "ChatGPT Classic."
2) If you get the new ChatGPT app and replace your current app with it, you don't get a "Classic" app and there's no way to download it.
3) Naming your app Classic is putting a bright red sign on it that says "this app will be abandoned soon." They might as well have called it "ChatGPT Sunset."
If this is all true, that is certainly...one way to do product management.
There is a funny interaction in the Microsoft store, where ChatGPT turns into Codex when you click on it: https://f003.backblazeb2.com/file/sharexxx/ShareX/2026/07/Ap...
(Also GG @ MSFT for opening a nag about Windows Hello twice while I wanted to stop the recording.)
This is the weirdest thing. It's completely unclear even if I was using the app for "work" rather than "coding" why I wouldn't just use the "Codex" option. Why even bother toggling? Can Codex actually not do any of the things in "Work"?
Plus they have lots of embedded web content these days and managing webviews is a relative pain vs it all being one webview
Good job.
what is badly broken about it, and what feature does it not support? im a pretty casual user, so i guess i havent noticed this bad breakage.
is there a 3rd chats somewhere that i am missing?
I ... hope we have an option for opting out of this? Otherwise I'm back on T3 Code.
By the way, it seems ChatGPT is confused as well:
Very confusing. But I do find it potentially interesting to treat general office work no differently from coding, which is something I had already been using Codex for in many ways before today
Codex creates a new folder in `~/Documents` in iCloud drive/OneDrive for every single thread you make. Furthermore, these threads are also polluted with your global AGENTS.md file, as well as all other developer_instructions that are injected by the harness.
I want my chats isolated from work contexts.
No it's not. Codex creates a new folder in `~/Documents` in iCloud drive/OneDrive for every single thread you make. Furthermore, these threads are also polluted with your global AGENTS.md file, as well as all other developer_instructions that are injected by the harness.
I want my chat isolated from work contexts.
I would expect the mode switcher to include a Chat mode, which would recreate the old, chat-focused UI, for asking about random topics. So, that's basically gone now. Technically, it's hidden and severely castrated.
I hope someone from OpenAI reads this. You guys have made a serious design mistake. I suspect you'll be getting a lot of support requests along the lines of "Where did all my chats go?"
The web version of ChatGPT is confusing too. Now it has separate “Chat” and “Work” tabs (what about a Codex tab?), and it shifts the burden on the user to know when to use one or the other. Note that using the “Work” tab means using Codex usage limits [^1], but that’s hidden away in the settings.
Also, apparently “GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-5.6 Luna are not selectable in standard ChatGPT conversations” [^2] — so if you want to use these models, you must go to the Work tab or download the app.
I don’t understand why there is so much fragmentation in what was supposed to be a unified app. The way that it is now, it’s far from intuitive.
[^1]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001275-chatgpt-work-an...
[^2]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001354-gpt-56-in-chatg...
And this comes from someone that has most chats inside Codex, so I should be the least impacted by this!
What are they developing? I see no improvements (talking about the frontend / apps, not the models)
Now the 'ChatGPT desktop app' (the Codex app, renamed) also has the split between work and code, and as far as I can tell, all it does is change which plugins are loaded by default to include Office ones when you put it in work mode. Perhaps it also changes the system prompt slightly?
There is no clear product vision or overarching roadmap in terms of users and UX, it is just vaguely connected things being vibe-coded in parallel.
So my understanding of the differences between chat, code and co-work; but may well be wrong!
Chat is the human, talking directly to the LLM - old school. Very basic can create docs etc - but saves in a temp folder. No real access to your local PC.
Cowork / work - Human talking to an agent, which can then use tools to do work. Also runs in a container, allowing it access to your drives/computer.
Claude Code / Codex - No longer in a container, full access to the computer, depending on what permissions you give. No longer locked in a container. + The agent is more focused on coding than cowork / work.
I suspect this difference is pretty minimal. Before Cowork launched I was using Claude Code in the way that I use Cowork now and getting pretty much the same results albeit without the sandboxing (which is more of a hassle than not, TBH). OpenAI says in their announcement that the same is true for Codex, which doesn't surprise me at all.
These agentic loops are pretty applicable to all kinds of tasks, not just coding, and people started realizing this pretty quickly upon their introduction / creation.
I understand what you mean by this but in the end you decide what's locked in a VM / container. Not OpenAI. Not Anthropic.
I switched because Cowork felt like a bunch of features thrown in by engineers without thought to the UX. Codex solved a lot of those issues for me - remote control from mobile has native approval dialogs, and you can start new threads from mobile - you can remote control from another laptop - computer use doesn't hijack my computer from me because it uses a11y trees instead of screenshots - it was super unclear which skills were accessible to which surface (claude chat, cowork in app, code in app, code in cli). - codex chooses the right browser profile and gets stuck less often than cowork + claude-in-chrome. I know there are 3P skills to use playwright or the chrome CDP, but I've found the native browser use most productive even if slower.
A few people here are missing the old ChatGPT app, but I found myself increasingly using Codex for casual chats too, and never using ChatGPT. You never know when the conversation might evolve to requiring tools in Codex, so no real downside to it. Yes, separation of work and personal accounts, or connecting multiple google accounts, is still unsolved on both Codex and Cowork AFAICT.
For a bit, I got FOMO because of Fable, but now it looks like 5.6 might continue the monthly model leapfrog pattern.
Agents-on-your-machine clearly have their place, but for many workflows this is too unruly. Hence, the "long-running agent running on shared infra" pattern.
I think this is where the ball is headed. I'm building towards an open source version of this[0]. Still just working on the core, but hopefully soon self-hosted versions can be built on top.
Interesting. So the main use case would be entities that run lightspeed on a beefy private cloud or on premise?
My thesis is that the right abstraction is durable workflow engines. And AFAIK, OAI also uses Temporal for their complicated hosted agent infra.
Regarding "ChatGPT Work" vs "ChatGPT Codex" - In Work diffs are gone and in new chats there's a popup proposing creating docs or sheets. That's it I believe.
I've loved using Cowork recently for sourcing decisions. Things where seemingly everyone's out of stock or questionably reputable, just let Cowork spin for 20 minutes, find the best new and best used options that meet your requirements, probably also suggesting a different item that does the job and is available for cheap. I've done it enough that I'm starting to loathe clicking through these sites myself.
edit reply because rate-limited: They were exposed via the Codex desktop app and controllable via the iOS app.
Incredible, really.
And as of now Google hasn't fuxx0red up Gemini yet.
Worse still: what happens when your workflow involves both coding and general knowledge work? Are you expected to switch apps, or switch settings? To me, it sounds very confusing and inefficient, and not at all what I was expecting.
They have, if you try to download ChatGPT app, it actually downloads codex now, and the first screen is "Codex is now the ChatGPT App"
Admittedly, I was already using Codex a bit like Claude Cowork. I'm just surprised they decided to merge threads.
This looks like OpenAI catching up to Anthropic's Cowork.
I guess it's supposed to be a part of ChatGPT now, but I cannot see any update there yet.
btw I kinda hate this, because ChatGPT was always very slow for me - possibly due to amount of historical threads I have there
Edit: I found them back in the 'classic' version of the app. Wildly confusing what is going to happen to the data there, chats, projects, custom GPT's.
This is going to be fun tomorrow when everyone at the company I work at finds out all their chats, projects and GPT’s are ‘gone’ after they ‘update’. And not a word about this switcheroo ‘data loss’ in their comms. Wow.
Is there anything it can do that codex can't?
I can get some useful results from codex at work, because I have to, except for when I don't. I accept that risk factor and compensate by reviewing _everything_ it spits out.
But we all know what coding is, in a very broad stroke manner, sure.
What does an end of month report mean? I automatically increase the font size when I send the spreadsheet to Paul. I review tickets and provide a meta write-up on Friday. Or maybe Monday, because Fred didn't get back to me until 5:30 Friday, and I closed my laptop at 4.
These are just little things, and they're repetitive, but each time, there's some little idiosyncracy. I have reservations regarding any piece of software being able to finesse that.
