Simon Willison maps ChatGPT Work's cloud agent tools, shared Codex quota, and browser automation

Simon Willison maps ChatGPT Work's cloud agent tools, shared Codex quota, and browser automation

  • Simon Willison separates ChatGPT Work into Work Cloud at chatgpt.com and in mobile apps, and Work Local in the desktop app, which can access local files and run programs; the article examines the cloud version only.
  • Work Cloud is limited to subscribers paying $20 per month or more and exposes Sol, Luna, Terra, and GPT-5.5 model choices with reasoning levels that differ from Chat's 5.6 selections.
  • Willison reports that Work Cloud combines an Internet-connected code-execution environment, a headless Chrome browser, and a persistent filesystem shared across sessions, while regular Chat's container blocks package installation and website or API access.
  • Work Cloud can publish ChatGPT Sites, run sub-agent sessions with Sol, Luna, and Terra, and schedule prompt automations; Willison believes its sessions draw from a separate Codex allowance rather than the Chat allowance.
  • A site generated in a fresh Work session documented the available tools and skills; it identified browser control as a skill that operates through the Node.js REPL rather than a visible browser-control tool.

Hacker News opinions

The browser is not fully headless. It can expose a remote desktop, though the remote-control view froze within seconds when I tried it.

Work consuming my Codex allowance makes it dead on arrival for me. I use all of that budget for Codex already, even though the extra chat features sound useful.

I would be careful pushing that argument too hard. OpenAI's likely response is to charge normal ChatGPT sessions against the Codex budget too.

I use my allowance with Shelley on exe.dev, but Work seems worth trying if it has a capability Shelley lacks. At least coding agents appear to compete on fairly even terms for normal ChatGPT use.

I think people are missing how useful Work's computer-use mode is. I can remote in from the app, dictate instructions, and have it draft an email from Gmail and attach folder documents or complete multi-step travel forms in 5 to 10 minutes.

That is impressive, but also unsettling for official forms. AI handling tedious paperwork can beat someone making manual-entry mistakes, but the stakes are higher when it gets details wrong.

I do not see why this beats Claude Code from mobile or Codex in the ChatGPT app if you already have a machine and tooling. The real audience may be people who do not keep a computer available or know how to connect their services.

For an occasional task, sure. For a recurring workflow, I would rather use a dedicated tool than the latest ChatGPT app that tries to do everything.

Sol Light is excellent for computer use. I use it to navigate awful web SaaS menus whenever there is no API.

Extra High and Pro are available in ChatGPT Teams at $25 per seat with a two-seat minimum, not only on $100-plus plans. But that access is reportedly about to move to $100-per-month Premium seats.

I use Work for long background jobs. It can build a 100-slide deck with speaker notes and visually check every slide, though it cannot use embedding or TTS models under its quota and cannot read video.

I ran Simon's tool-documentation prompt in ChatGPT Desktop on a default Windows 10 setup. I counted 9 top-level orchestration tools, 83 operations inside functions.exec, 92 callable operations total, and 10 separate execution helpers.

Codex in ChatGPT Desktop with 5.6 Sol is already my daily non-coding tool, and Work looks largely like a reskin. OpenAI and Anthropic have made their desktop products confusing by combining new modes into their existing chat apps instead of launching clear products for business users.

I agree that mixing modes into the chat app is disorienting. I want separate interfaces for separate contexts, even if the underlying system can do the same tasks.

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