The ChatGPT "Super App" Sort of Super Sucks

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I am so confused right now. I mean that literally. Trying to use the new ChatGPT app on the Mac, I'm confused. I knew this was coming, more or less, and I'm still confused! I hope "regular" users don't try this anytime soon, because it's a mess.<br>The "good" news is that it's such a mess that simply trying to update the old ChatGPT app, does trigger an update, but it's actually not the new ChatGPT app, but rather an updated version of the old one. So anyone doing a regular update, shouldn't be shoved into this new experience – yet. Instead, to get the new ChatGPT app, you need to manually re-download it from the page on OpenAI's website. Or have Codex installed, because that should update to this new ChatGPT. And that's because the old Codex is essentially the new ChatGPT.<br>Yes, the "Super App" is here. Unfortunately, it super sucks.<br>Again, I knew all of this was coming thanks to leaks and just general statements from various OpenAI executives. But somehow I still wasn't prepared. Because I assumed that given OpenAI's solid history of product prowess, I thought this new ChatGPT would just be... better? Instead, it's seemingly just Codex merged with ChatGPT to look and importantly, act, like Anthropic's Claude Mac app.<br>But the Claude Mac app is also sort of a mess! It's a tangle of toggles and strange UI decisions. OpenAI took the straightforward ChatGPT app and made a mess.<br>Yes, part of that mess is because it's seemingly no longer a native Mac app but instead a bloated Electron package. I'm not as religious about such things as John Gruber of Daring Fireball is, but, yeah, this sucks, relatively speaking. Electron apps, by their nature, simply aren't as performant as native apps. I understand the cross-development and deployment trade-offs – I was a board observer at Slack back in the day – but OpenAI sort of bait-and-switched us here.1<br>Look how they massacred my boy.But to me, the bigger issue is the UI choices.<br>It took me a while to figure out what was going on with 'ChatGPT Work' – and that was after I watched the unveiling video. I knew this was a new aspect of ChatGPT, but I assumed the "old" aspect would remain as the default here. You know, chat. Having written a post entitled "Chat is dead" specifically about OpenAI moving away from the chat paradigm for ChatGPT, I also probably should have realized this! But I just didn't think OpenAI would make this transition so jarring.<br>When I see the new ChatGPT app launch into 'ChatGPT Work', I instinctively assume it's an enterprise version of the app. Instead, OpenAI clearly means for 'ChatGPT Work' to evoke 'Claude Cowork', you know the agentic set of Claude tools, but this is insanely clunky branding. As much as people may know Claude Cowork, probably infinitely more think of Microsoft's enterprise suite of productivity tools when they see 'Work'. Or they think of the English language itself. And 'ChatGPT Work' makes it sound like it's ChatGPT to use at work. Like as in your office. As in not for home. Not for personal use.<br>My god this is stupid branding. It's not bad in the way Microsoft branding is often bad. It's just dumb.<br>Anyway, my immediate instinct was to click on the 'ChatGPT Work' drop-down and try to get back to 'ChatGPT' itself. But there is no such option. But there is an option: it's to switch to 'ChatGPT Codex'. What the fuck?<br>I thought that was the whole point of this new app? That Codex was now ChatGPT. But as it turns out, they really wanted to exactly copy Anthropic here. So 'ChatGPT Work' – again, their version of Claude Cowork – is distinct from 'ChatGPT Codex' – their version of Claude Code. Why these have to be different things, I don't know. I mean I think I do know. I think it's so as not to piss off/confuse developers.<br>At the same time, both OpenAI and Anthropic have been adamant that their coding tools are for far more than developers. In fact, software development may already be a minority use case. So they will clearly be merged at some point. And OpenAI could have taken the lead here, but chose not to. Confusing us all!<br>Of course, the real confusion stems from the one main thing they're doing differently than Anthropic here: they don't default you into 'Chat'. Let's just pause for a moment to consider how insane it is that a product called 'ChatGPT' doesn't default you into chat mode but instead "work" mode. Again, Claude does default to chat by way of a toggle (where you can switch to Claude Cowork) which is separate from their main toggle (where you switch to Claude Code). That's not great, but OpenAI's UI choice is somehow much worse. 'Chat' got shoved into the sidebar.<br>Yes, 'Chat' is now a buried sub-menu feature of ChatGPT.<br>It's below 'New task' (for ChatGPT Work), 'Scheduled' (for ChatGPT Work), and 'Plugins' (for ChatGPT Work). The priorities could not be any more loud and clear.<br>But crazier still is that clicking on 'Chat' doesn't take you into the good,...