Nobody really knows how to product-ize any of these LLM interfaces beyond just chat.
They don't want a traditional UI with buttons and forms and labels because they want the interface to be "chat". The problem is that "chat" is tedious. And the turn-based, linear nature of the chat interaction model makes it even more tedious and unproductive.
These kinds of updates always have this romantic scenario of someone having Claude develop a presentation or something on their way to work between multiple devices, which actually feels a little sad and does not align with what happens in my life at all.
I very intentionally have all memory turned off for chat. The amount of times I want to discuss an approach for it to pull memory out and have that steer the decision making is so obnoxious
People keep asking for this w/ Codex, too, and I really regret that both labs seem inclined to listen.
If you ask a thinking/research type question in 'Chat' versus 'Work' mode in these products -- say, something complex about politics, or do a multiturn business strategy, or want to work thru a new concept, you get very different answers.
The harness, steering, etc. in the chat/reasoning products is so much better for this type of question (that doesn't require code as a primary substrate).
Even as someone who mainlines like, 7 coding agents at all times, I regret that productivity fever will mean the regression of think-first-act-later AI UX.
The fact that it doesn't work well today doesn't invalidate the user need. Not everyone wants a terminal style interface. Traditional UX makes more sense especially if say you are accessing existing plugins and say kicking off a scheduling task - no way would I want to do that via a chat interface if I have the option.
I turned off Anthropic properly and switched all of that over to OpenAI yesterday. (I use other models for other things too, especially DeepSeek in Pi).
Honestly aside from the voice it uses you wouldn't notice a difference. Switching costs are low, vote with your wallet.
A change for the better. The distinction made it unnecessarily complex for users. The ChatGPT desktop app inherited the same separation. Having to change between ChatGPT for day to day questions, to Codex for everything else always seemed too cumbersome.
Is there a mature centralized platform, self hosted, that sync all your “AI stuff” across multiple devices? So regardless of the harness, it sync the api keys, providers, skills, and seasons for starters with other authenticated machines? Say you used codex on macos_1 through this platform, and later you used opencode on linux_3, it syncs everything to the new machine, no ssh to centralized machine, no git, none of that duct tape solutions, which they work but cumbersome.
The mistake here is thinking or treating AI tools as special or different in any way. We’ve had tooling that does this for decades. Ansible, puppet, saltstack, NixOS/home-manager, and dozens of other solutions. Even better, writing the configuration is extra simple now, since you can just ask your agent to do it.
Nobody really knows how to product-ize any of these LLM interfaces beyond just chat.
They don't want a traditional UI with buttons and forms and labels because they want the interface to be "chat". The problem is that "chat" is tedious. And the turn-based, linear nature of the chat interaction model makes it even more tedious and unproductive.
This has been my ongoing gripe. Someone put chat in front of a transformer model. It exploded like all prior versions of “AI chat” did. Now what?
The moment someone figures out a new modality for LLMs is when we’ll see the next hockey stick.
Do you know that you can have multiple chats at the same time?
"We're not getting adoption in this thing that increases token spend and makes us more sticky what should we do?"
"Not sure man, we already tried opt-out instead of opt-in and that didn't work..."
"Oh, I know, what if ... what if we just glued them together and gave them no option?!"
These kinds of updates always have this romantic scenario of someone having Claude develop a presentation or something on their way to work between multiple devices, which actually feels a little sad and does not align with what happens in my life at all.
weirdly enough, that aligns exactly with my life.
Two years ago, I had no commute, and presentations were tedious ( i was NOT a good google slides user ), I kinda prefer this world for now
Most normal users have no idea whether to choose chat or cowork. This makes sense for 95% of customers.
To Anthropic: I hope you don't merge Claude Code and chat, I like keeping their memory separate.
I very intentionally have all memory turned off for chat. The amount of times I want to discuss an approach for it to pull memory out and have that steer the decision making is so obnoxious
People keep asking for this w/ Codex, too, and I really regret that both labs seem inclined to listen.
If you ask a thinking/research type question in 'Chat' versus 'Work' mode in these products -- say, something complex about politics, or do a multiturn business strategy, or want to work thru a new concept, you get very different answers.
The harness, steering, etc. in the chat/reasoning products is so much better for this type of question (that doesn't require code as a primary substrate).
Even as someone who mainlines like, 7 coding agents at all times, I regret that productivity fever will mean the regression of think-first-act-later AI UX.
I sometimes get very different answers if I ask the chat product the same question multiple times.
The fact that it doesn't work well today doesn't invalidate the user need. Not everyone wants a terminal style interface. Traditional UX makes more sense especially if say you are accessing existing plugins and say kicking off a scheduling task - no way would I want to do that via a chat interface if I have the option.
I hope this doesn’t get confusing like ChatGPT made it.
I feel like Claude has some of the best UX, and hope this doesn’t dilute the experience.
I'm starting to explore alternative options because Claude has become an awful value proposition. Any suggestions?
I turned off Anthropic properly and switched all of that over to OpenAI yesterday. (I use other models for other things too, especially DeepSeek in Pi).
Honestly aside from the voice it uses you wouldn't notice a difference. Switching costs are low, vote with your wallet.
So you voted for Kodos instead of Kang [1]. Local models are the way out of the rug pulling
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BUAnyVAanac&ra=m
I don't actually disagree, and advocate that for now the thing to do is use both.
You need to use frontier models to understand where the puck is going, but also to use local ones for anything remotely sensitive.
Opencode Go.
I guess this is a feature worth announcing
A change for the better. The distinction made it unnecessarily complex for users. The ChatGPT desktop app inherited the same separation. Having to change between ChatGPT for day to day questions, to Codex for everything else always seemed too cumbersome.
Is there a mature centralized platform, self hosted, that sync all your “AI stuff” across multiple devices? So regardless of the harness, it sync the api keys, providers, skills, and seasons for starters with other authenticated machines? Say you used codex on macos_1 through this platform, and later you used opencode on linux_3, it syncs everything to the new machine, no ssh to centralized machine, no git, none of that duct tape solutions, which they work but cumbersome.
The mistake here is thinking or treating AI tools as special or different in any way. We’ve had tooling that does this for decades. Ansible, puppet, saltstack, NixOS/home-manager, and dozens of other solutions. Even better, writing the configuration is extra simple now, since you can just ask your agent to do it.
I love this
Claude's mobile app wouldn't show any Cowork initiated conversations, even if those conversations didn't leverage cowork specific features