I just installed this. I am very confused. I no longer have a Codex app on my computer. ChatGPT is now Codex.
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?
Sad, I liked that ChatGPT had a native app on macOS. I don’t understand why OpenAI and Anthropic have to rely on vending universal apps when their whole MO is code being dirt cheap.
The only difference I can see is that the controls for local/remote, branch, and worktrees disappear, and instead it shows office suite plugins. I would presume it affects the system prompt in the background?
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.
> Even though it says Work or Codex or whatever you can just ask it whatever you want, and it will work.
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.
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.
> 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 don't know why you're downvoted. This is field is so rapidly changing and confusing and on top of that burried underneath a shitload of new marketing terms.
Anthropic just changed their web interface yesterday to have Chat versus Cowork as well, and every time I look at it, I'm so confused. I'm still so unclear when I'm supposed to use one or the other or the other.
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?
Not sure if the cause but there’s this overarching absolute neglect of UX. Maybe they’re all just trying to grab as much market share as humanly possible, but imo it seems more likely they’ll lose each segment to products that actually make sure the experience isn’t absolute dog shit.
I had switched from Claude Cowork to OAI Codex a month ago. This seems like a rebranding and app merging to make it more obvious. And switching between the newly named "ChatGPT Work" vs "ChatGPT Code" mostly just seems to increase the verbosity of technical outputs, while using the same harness underneath.
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.
I just clicked "Upgrade" in the macOS Codex Desktop app and it relaunched with a new name, "ChatGPT". My existing install of the macOS ChatGPT app seems to have been renamed "ChatGPT Classic".
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.
The capabilities are useless if you don't expose them, and a cli or api doesn't. You'll mention their marketing page keeps talking about finance, sales, management etc...
In my experience, claude cowork has been pretty much useless. for the desktop control, it just seems like the The accessibility stuff is just not there yet on macOS to support it.
I think these kind of semi-coding agents--but hosted--are the future for enterprises. Claude Tag, Claude Cowork, now Work by OAI.
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.
yes, basically people that want to host powerful, long-running agent runs not on dedicated VMs (although lightspeed can use those too), but on an abstraction layer above.
My thesis is that the right abstraction is durable workflow engines. And AFAIK, OAI also uses Temporal for their complicated hosted agent infra.
The resulting "combined" Codex + ChatGPT mac app is super confusing. I use the Codex app with my work account, but I liked the old ChatGPT app, which I kept logged in with my personal account, for my LLM chat needs. I guess I can just use ChatGPT.com, but this was a rather jarring change.
I wonder why they haven’t simply continued to rebrand Codex as a general-purpose tool. ChatGPT Work is a convoluted name and continues the trend of having separate brands for separate things, what runs counter to OpenAI’s purported goal of unifying every workflow into a single “superapp”.
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.
because every non-programmer hears “codex” and thinks that it’s for coding only - seems like a large hurdle to adoption. claude has been successful with cowork branding which makes sense.
Isn't Microsoft heavily invested? As one should know, Microsoft are experts at confusing and contrived naming with no connection to reality: Windows Home, Windows Home Premium, Windows Professional, Business, Premium, Small Business etc. Now it is Copilot: Copilot, Copilot Plus, Copilot 365, pretty and Copilot Copilot too, I guess. And ofc Microsoft points, the currency for Xbox. And yeah, anything is Xbox too.
Very interesting approach, however I wonder if the combination of Codex + Work in the same app makes sense? I could see a world where the technical needs of a developer are hampered by the overall superapp architecture. I guess we'll see?
So I've now lost all my ChatGPT chats? Or did they hide them?
I see some of them, but the history is inaccessible??
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.
All models I’ve used have been exceptionally bad at creating a high level business oriented vision and strategy from various inputs. The output just feels like it can’t see past the next word, or render distance, misses the big picture and anything not specified in prompt or input context
This is true but I also find the opposite true: the model is highly dependent on the input/prompt, to the point that it can't think beyond it or about it.
I ended up going the with gemini to provide sota ai to my family in an affordable way. You could always make your chatgpt sub accessible to your family via discord with a bot that codex can produce in under 5mins.
Am I the only one who thinks this landing page is garbage? Funkily it feels like a long wall of slop. I guess you shouldn’t get high on your own supply.
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.
I just installed this. I am very confused. I no longer have a Codex app on my computer. ChatGPT is now Codex.
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?
The old ChatGPT is now ChatGPT Classic. Codex is now ChatGPT.
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 window twice while I wanted to stop the recording.)
Sad, I liked that ChatGPT had a native app on macOS. I don’t understand why OpenAI and Anthropic have to rely on vending universal apps when their whole MO is code being dirt cheap.
Same. I don't see why they thought this was a good move.
maybe they asked chatgpt about it :)
> I just installed this. I am very confused. I no longer have a Codex app on my computer. ChatGPT is now Codex.
I ... hope we have an option for opting out of this? Otherwise I'm back on T3 Code.
The only difference I can see is that the controls for local/remote, branch, and worktrees disappear, and instead it shows office suite plugins. I would presume it affects the system prompt in the background?
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
I think the idea is that there should be no difference between 'casual chat' and 'serious chat'. why not chat in codex
Going to repost my comment from below:
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.
Does codex not have a pre prompt about being a coding agent like claude code does?
I think coding models and harness are good/better at general questions and simple problems. something about coding being general format to think.
It’s all ChatGPT under the hood. Even though it says Work or Codex or whatever you can just ask it whatever you want, and it will work.
> Even though it says Work or Codex or whatever you can just ask it whatever you want, and it will work.
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 have a longer version of this, but in summary
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.
> 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.
Cowork is just Claude Code + tools to read Microsoft Office files
Claude code is sandboxed by default no?
I don't know why you're downvoted. This is field is so rapidly changing and confusing and on top of that burried underneath a shitload of new marketing terms.
Anthropic just changed their web interface yesterday to have Chat versus Cowork as well, and every time I look at it, I'm so confused. I'm still so unclear when I'm supposed to use one or the other or the other.
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?
Not sure if the cause but there’s this overarching absolute neglect of UX. Maybe they’re all just trying to grab as much market share as humanly possible, but imo it seems more likely they’ll lose each segment to products that actually make sure the experience isn’t absolute dog shit.
Anthropic's suite of products have practically zero cohesion across each other. I've said it some time before.
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.
I had switched from Claude Cowork to OAI Codex a month ago. This seems like a rebranding and app merging to make it more obvious. And switching between the newly named "ChatGPT Work" vs "ChatGPT Code" mostly just seems to increase the verbosity of technical outputs, while using the same harness underneath.
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.
I just clicked "Upgrade" in the macOS Codex Desktop app and it relaunched with a new name, "ChatGPT". My existing install of the macOS ChatGPT app seems to have been renamed "ChatGPT Classic".
So, Claude Cowork for OpenAI? Feels overdue!
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.
Feels like forever in the AI world but Claude Cowork only launched ~5 months ago. So not that overdue.
The capabilities were launched months ago. This is just retiring the ChatGPT app and replacing it with Codex for the masses
edit reply because rate-limited: They were exposed via the Codex desktop app and controllable via the iOS app.
The capabilities are useless if you don't expose them, and a cli or api doesn't. You'll mention their marketing page keeps talking about finance, sales, management etc...
In my experience, claude cowork has been pretty much useless. for the desktop control, it just seems like the The accessibility stuff is just not there yet on macOS to support it.
I think these kind of semi-coding agents--but hosted--are the future for enterprises. Claude Tag, Claude Cowork, now Work by OAI.
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.
[0] https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/lightspeed
> I'm building towards an open source version of this
Interesting. So the main use case would be entities that run lightspeed on a beefy private cloud or on premise?
yes, basically people that want to host powerful, long-running agent runs not on dedicated VMs (although lightspeed can use those too), but on an abstraction layer above.
My thesis is that the right abstraction is durable workflow engines. And AFAIK, OAI also uses Temporal for their complicated hosted agent infra.
The resulting "combined" Codex + ChatGPT mac app is super confusing. I use the Codex app with my work account, but I liked the old ChatGPT app, which I kept logged in with my personal account, for my LLM chat needs. I guess I can just use ChatGPT.com, but this was a rather jarring change.
If you really want, you can cmd+T and go to chatgpt.com within the ChatGPT app haha
> With Codex technology built-in, ChatGPT can now move beyond answering questions to getting real work done across web, mobile, and desktop.
This looks like OpenAI catching up to Anthropic's Cowork.
The capabilities were launched months ago. This is just retiring the ChatGPT app and replacing it with Codex for the masses.
I wonder why they haven’t simply continued to rebrand Codex as a general-purpose tool. ChatGPT Work is a convoluted name and continues the trend of having separate brands for separate things, what runs counter to OpenAI’s purported goal of unifying every workflow into a single “superapp”.
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.
because every non-programmer hears “codex” and thinks that it’s for coding only - seems like a large hurdle to adoption. claude has been successful with cowork branding which makes sense.
It looks like the ChatGPT is a very strong brand despite the confusing name (who the hell knows what GPT stands for?)
Doesn’t really matter what it stands for. ChatGPT is one of the most recognizable brands in the world right now.
> I wonder why they haven’t simply continued to rebrand Codex as a general-purpose tool.
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"
Isn't Microsoft heavily invested? As one should know, Microsoft are experts at confusing and contrived naming with no connection to reality: Windows Home, Windows Home Premium, Windows Professional, Business, Premium, Small Business etc. Now it is Copilot: Copilot, Copilot Plus, Copilot 365, pretty and Copilot Copilot too, I guess. And ofc Microsoft points, the currency for Xbox. And yeah, anything is Xbox too.
The toggle feels useless in the desktop app. It just changes a few shortcuts?!
Admittedly, I was already using Codex a bit like Claude Cowork. I'm just surprised they decided to merge threads.
Very interesting approach, however I wonder if the combination of Codex + Work in the same app makes sense? I could see a world where the technical needs of a developer are hampered by the overall superapp architecture. I guess we'll see?
So I've now lost all my ChatGPT chats? Or did they hide them? I see some of them, but the history is inaccessible??
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.
Can it replace my manager?
Yes and your new one will be paying much closer attention to you.
Codex just started downloading an update and it's gone. It removed itself.
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
Ok, I had to re-download Codex from OpenAI's webpage and click update again. Now it's actually different, but I must say it was all a bit confusing.
All models I’ve used have been exceptionally bad at creating a high level business oriented vision and strategy from various inputs. The output just feels like it can’t see past the next word, or render distance, misses the big picture and anything not specified in prompt or input context
This is true but I also find the opposite true: the model is highly dependent on the input/prompt, to the point that it can't think beyond it or about it.
I wish OpenAI had a family plan. I would love to pay and have my wife and kids use ChatGPT on a single subscription.
I ended up going the with gemini to provide sota ai to my family in an affordable way. You could always make your chatgpt sub accessible to your family via discord with a bot that codex can produce in under 5mins.
You could try Group Chats, though I'm not sure they will use the higher models of the subscribing participants..
How is this different than Codex?
They add a mode to Codex which is less technical or more oriented toward office work and you can toggle between the two.
Rebranding + expanding it beyond coding work.
It has a new name!
They are replacing ChatGPT with Codex
Which is funny because OpenAI talks up the value of their ChatGPT brand. Only coders know Codex.
Which is why the combined app is called ChatGPT, not Codex.
I sure hope it does!
That graph of internal adoption rate is laughable. Their KPIs and work requirements probably heavily skewed the curve.
It'd be super nice if tech companies stopped just building the same product and gave us concretely different ideas.
who cares?
Am I the only one who thinks this landing page is garbage? Funkily it feels like a long wall of slop. I guess you shouldn’t get high on your own supply.
Yeah... No.
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.
OpenAI clearly failed to consult ChatGPT for branding advice.
At least they didn't consult the USB Forum, which is what they have done in the past.