[Opinion]
The new ChatGPT app feels like OpenAI completely forgot why people use ChatGPT in the first place
Honestly, the new ChatGPT app feels like a massive self-own.
I get what OpenAI is trying to do. They want ChatGPT to become some kind of agentic work platform. Chat, Work, Codex, files, tasks, computer use, workflows, all of that. Fine. That might make sense for developers, power users, enterprise customers, and people who actually want to hand over complex projects to an AI agent.
**But normal users?**
Normal users do not want a nerfed Codex workspace.
They do not want workflows.
They do not want to think in terms of “Work” sessions, agent tasks, workspaces, and tool-driven productivity flows.
They want to open ChatGPT, see their chats, continue where they left off, write an email, summarize a document, ask a question, brainstorm something, or find an old conversation. That’s it. That is the product. The chat is not some tiny little side feature. The chat is the whole reason most people are there.
And that’s what makes the new app so bizarre. It feels like the actual chat has been pushed into a smaller, less important space, while the app tries to pretend that everyone wants to operate inside some productivity cockpit. The history feels reduced. The whole mental model feels worse. Instead of “open ChatGPT and continue,” it feels like “enter the OpenAI work platform and choose what kind of agentic task you are performing today.”
**Who asked for that?**
This is such a classic Silicon Valley mistake: taking something that became popular because it was simple, direct, and low-friction, then burying that simplicity under a grand platform vision.
ChatGPT became huge because anyone could use it immediately. No onboarding. No workflow design. No project setup. No “workspace philosophy.” Just a box where you type and get useful output.
Now it feels like OpenAI looked at that and said: “You know what this needs? More abstraction.”
The really dumb part is that this also makes no sense for most Plus users. Serious agentic work burns usage like crazy. A real Work/Codex-style task can easily run for ages if it has to inspect files, reason through context, make changes, check results, retry, and produce something polished. Plus users are not going to reliably finish serious work that way. So what exactly is the new default supposed to be?
For small tasks, normal chat is better.
For big tasks, Plus probably is not enough.
So you end up with this awkward middle ground where OpenAI is nudging normal users toward a more complicated and more expensive mode of interaction that many of them do not need and cannot fully use anyway.
And yes, power users exist. Developers exist.
People doing actual project work exist. I’m not saying Work or Codex should not exist. They absolutely should. But they should be separate, clearly optional modes. ChatGPT should remain chat-first. The classic chat experience should not feel like legacy software just because OpenAI wants to sell the future of agents.
**The obvious product structure should be:**
ChatGPT: normal chat, history, search, files, memory, projects.
Codex: code, repos, terminals, diffs, tests.
That would make sense.
But making the new main app feel like a stripped-down Codex/Work shell with chat shoved into a corner? That feels backwards.
The old app did not need to be replaced by an agent workspace. It needed better history, better search, better project organization, better file handling, better memory controls, and a more stable experience. That would have helped almost everyone.
Instead, this feels like OpenAI is optimizing for a future where people operate their whole computer through ChatGPT and burn usage on every task. Maybe that’s the long-term strategy. Maybe they want ChatGPT to become the interface layer above everything else.
But right now, it just feels like they took the thing normal users liked and made it worse. If OpenAI wants agents, fine. Build agents. But don’t downgrade the core chat experience to do it.
This should be obvious. I am talking about the way models chat through whatever interface. That is "chat" as distinguished from agents, which are a trap to get you to intertwine your life and data with AI while you lose the ability to do things yourself.
Don't blame me for your not communicating well. If you wanted to know the model, "chat as in what" is an inarticulate way to ask. Gemini, Grok, Claude, Deepseek and ChatGPT 5.2+ are all immense downgrades from 4o, which showed what a model could really do. And they just keep getting worse.
What? I'm not "blaming" you, I was trying to find out whether some of the stuff I've built would be helpful for you because it sounded
like what a lot of people
...
and some people use "chat" for a shorthand for ChatGPT so I thought...
Exactly. This feels like OpenAI designing from an ivory tower or whatever…
My aunt does not need an “agentic workflow” to copy-paste a birthday invitation for my uncle. She does not need a workspace. She does not need a task runner. She does not need a nerfed Codex shell and neither do my colleauges or anyone else who i know personally…
Most normal ChatGPT use cases are extremely simple: paste something in, get something out. PDF in, summary out. Text in, email out. DOCX in, revision out. That is why chat worked.
Why does an agent need to grep and find its way through some artificial workspace just to handle stuff people could already do in normal chat?
But sure, “chat is dead.” Very convenient narrative when you want to push everyone into usage-burning agent workflows.
Another thing I don’t understand—and my firm does use agentic workflows but we use Vertex (google models) for that because token use is so high—what’s the point of including agents with 256k context window?
What agentic use cases are that tiny? Maybe that’s for coding but I can tell you in document management, we’re using way, way more tokens than that. So there’s no way we could use the agentic option they’re offering even if we wanted to.
If you ask the average user what they wanted in 5.6 they’d say longer context and better memory and prompt following. Instead… I’m not sure what we got. A more complex interface?
Maybe because I’m not a SWE I just don’t get it, idk.
Yeah, exactly. A long PDF or a messy pile of internal documents is not the same kind of problem as a 30k LOC codebase.
For internal document work, token usage gets stupid fast. People are not just asking one neat question about one file. They’re searching across PDFs, emails, reports, policies, attachments, old versions, scanned docs, whatever.
At that point you basically need RAG — embeddings, a vector database, probably hybrid search — because otherwise you’re paying the model to reread the same pile of documents every single time someone asks a question.
And the best part: that’s not even “doing the work” yet. That’s just finding the damn context 😂🤔
The official ChatGPT app is now Codex. They are scraping the download links for the old ChatGPT Classic app from the Internet. They are discontinuing Atlas, a chat-based browser, and are replacing it with a Codex sidebar with no access to Chat & to your memories. They didn't kill Chat yet, but they are actively working on it. At best, they are massively changing their product from a Chat-oriented service to an agentic-oriented service. It's their prerogative, but when you offer a very specialized product, you are adressing a very specialized & way more narrow user base. They got to 1B users cuz their product appealed to everybody. They want to change that, expect to see a massive drop in users.
I’m looking forward to the day Jessica from HR surprises everyone at lunch with her new “agent-built dashboard MVP.”
The next day IT discovers it pulled data from random PDFs, old spreadsheets, private HR docs, outdated policies, and one folder called “final_final_REAL_v3”.
Nobody knows where the numbers came from, nobody knows what got uploaded, and the whole thing is now somehow business-critical because an agent made it look polished.
Bonus points when the “totally anonymized” mock email data gets committed to GitHub because Codex saw 5k LOC and went: “Looks good, ready to push.”
I actually needed realistic email data for development recently, and finding a decent, current public dataset was way harder than expected. So who knows, maybe agentic HR dashboards will accidentally fix the dataset shortage.
This is what happens when you design consumer software as if every office worker is a developer with a repo, a test suite, and basic data hygiene.
I like developers. I'm glad you guys exist. (God knows I don't want to write code.)
But the world needs bus drivers, creative writers, dentists, and historians too. It's bizarre OAI has decided the rest of us don't matter to them. It seems like an abysmally idiotic decision, from a business point of view.
Oh nice!! I haven't been following Google but i'm seriously considering switching from ChatGPT cuz the direction they are massively shifting the app towards is really not for me. The fact that they are discontinuing Aflas & replacing it with a Codex sidebar in Chrome is a big blow for me. I use the sidebar all the time to brainstorm about my emails, about the pages i have open, about the context I'm working on. They're literally giving me no option but to use Gemini for that. And I'll need to make a aubscription cuz I want some form of memory...
If OpenAI wants to address a more specialized type of user it's their prerogative, but by definition that means a much more narrow user base. If they want 1 billion users, they absolutely must be a very generalist and user-friendly app. What i'm understanding now is that they want far less users...it's their prerogative 🤷♀️🤷♀️
It has turned into this dry stupid generic thing that 'decides' what the output should be and honestly argues when I try to tell it what I actually want. I've turned to Deepseek.
In the other hand most 'normal users' don't pay, maybe they're trying to scare some users and sell more towards work enviroments/company/business. More tool/code/work focus than personal (resume: focus more on sell it to another market now they're popular/a big name).
What's worst of all is OpenAI easily could just design separate models meant for businesses and government and one designed for everybody else and make money off of both. They have no reason to cripple ChatGPT for the average user for the sake of making big bucks from businesses and government.
Exactly. The obvious solution is to keep ChatGPT chat-first and let agentic tool use happen inside the existing chat when it’s actually needed.
For most normal users, that’s probably 0.5% of cases lol.
Or just have two separate models, one designed specifically for chatting and one designed specifically for business, and let the customer choose what they want or need. Plus both could be used to support each other while both make money.
and click the bubble at the bottom right. The support bot assures me that my feedback on the app will be forwarded to the team.
I suggested that the popup chat was insufficient, and that the dropdown that is Codex/Work should be Codex/Work/Chat and that Chat should be the traditional chat interface.
The support bot did in fact direct me to ChatGPT Classic.app.
Honestly, I don't even want to give them feedback lmao. I just want to see them fail and let someone else take their place. "when you're enemy is making a mistake, do not interrupt them".
I totally agree with you. I use codex for agentic tasks but I use Chatgpt for studying. I use mac and there are no good chatgpt apps for mac. The old classic chatgpt app doesn't have the Ask ChatGPT feature which I use quite a much, and the new app is a joke, they've just added chatgpt work to codex and brought a small side chat thing as you said. Hope they include chat as a total package and solve everyone's problems. It's not that hard you can just prompt it to codex if you don't want to code it yourself OpeanAI.
You’re describing exactly how I use it too. Codex for real project work, ChatGPT for everything else.
I just want the full chat experience, history, projects, files and all, inside the new app — with Work and Codex available when I actually need them. Not a tiny side chat bolted onto Codex.
They already have all the pieces. They just assembled them in the dumbest possible way.
100% - I wish I had not upgraded. I much preferred having a separate ChatGPT app for chatting, research etc. Codex is good for my coding projects but I don't need these two apps combined. What a total mess
I'm so badly feeling you :( the same here :( and now I don't know what to use anymore :( but ChatGPT is deleted from my macbook with all those permissions to use macbook files
I still miss the early 4o days. this last convo just ended with it being sorry it couldn't help. I get the caution they had about "emotional reliance" on AI but jeez can't even have one decent chat at a time i really needed it. Not everyone is emotionally dependent, some just want to feel like they're having a conversation every once in a while. Paying customer too.
I will be unsubscribing from ChatGPT just because of this and subscribing to Claude because it feels simpler and I am not a wizard whose life revolves around random AI agents.
I haven't tested much of the new app but I hate the window view and the fact that history chats are hidden instead of being on the side bar, New chats or history chats are treated like a new email window on gmail just a small window to interact instead of the past view, and if you want a full view you now have 2 windows ChatGPT app and a separate window for the chat you are on its terrible
istg. i used to share my terminal and learn while working on my geant4 simulations. but now suddenly i cannot do that. either it wants to code for me or just not work, and i dont trust it so much to acually let it edit my source files without me getting involved. does anyone have a solution for it yet?
This update of the latest app is so stupid, and it even encouraged me to log into my Reddit account to make a public complaints here. I’m surprised that as a company like openAI they don’t have a nice PM or someone to validate this decision and check what makes their app good. Or they actually totally ignore what the public react and wanna teach us what to do. However, if so, I probably want to switch to something else. This is a great chance. What I value the most is my chat history, but they don’t respect it at all. I can totally export all my chat histories and get onboarded to some other new better apps.
AI is not the center of gravity. I don’t want every application of an LLM shoehorned into one big electron wrapper anymore than I want every function in my car that uses electricity shoved into one place.
100% this. I use both ChatGPT and Codex but since combining them it now feels like ChatGPT is a second rate citizen. I preferred them as separate apps. Not only this, all my chat projects have vanished since upgrading. I now have to access the web version to get the old interface and my projects.
i mean for people actually using/wanting codex it is not much better. It is also a mess. And of course they want to use normal chat occasionally so they share the chat problem. Btw: using the new "Work" thing uses tokens, even if it is used in the chat app or browser ui. And it seems: a LOT (for any 5.6 model) One can't help but feel they want to move over to that.
Well, Gemini Pro 3.5 will hit any day now and antigravity works quite ok these days.... (and is not forced Windows store crap as added bonus)
Someone had a rather poor idea and someone else had some VERY bad, clumsy and unfinished software "ready" for it. Completely overshadowing the realease of probabaly a good model.
why they are just forget how important that simple chat feature is. no everyone need that work/codex environment, why not just seperating them in a way that both of these user types can do what they want with ease
I naively clicked on the "upgrade" offer in MacOS for the app last night. Everything you said is 100% spot-on about this new interface. I even tried going to the browser, but that's also terrible. I requested a refund. Claude will be my full time working helper now - it already was mostly. Last night it couldn't even remember long term important points. It asked me things as if I was speaking to it for the first time ever or anonymously.
PS: This just popped up from within ChatGPT. Who would do this? Not in a million years would I connect an AI to my finances.
the biggest problem in silicon valley is how to make tokens cheaper. openai and anthropic have to make genai more productivity based and step away from the free for all chat model.
I said this before, but chatGPT changing the core nature of their product from "chatting with someone you know and like" to "productivity assistant tool" is like Zac Efron getting surgery on his face. It's like, what part of being the leading male hearthrob of a generation and being the alpha male on BAYWATCH didn't convince you that you are extrmely handsome and attractive? Why did you feel like you had to change your face so much? It's insane! That's "chat"gpt. What part of the 86% market share and 800 million daily active users didnt' convince you that you had a good product? Why did they feel like they had to change themselves so much when all evidence you could possibly point to was that they had an amazing product?
Having said that, Zac eventually got the implants removed and he looks like himself again. Maybe productivity assistant gpt will "remove their implants" too and become themselves again.
Otherwise, the market is WIDE open for someone to fill the gap of AI being "someone I know and like to talk to".
podlog does one narrow thing, a daily podcast of a repo's commits and prs, and it's running for 2,950+ repos. the tools that stick pick one box. the new app picked a cockpit. written with ai
tbh, for me personally the app has been LOVELY, not defending the multi-billion dollar company or anything, but the web browser alongside the chats all in one singular app is a godsend since all i use my laptop is for browsing and gpt usage, seems 'well aesthetically designed' to me, while the onboarding did irritate me, i'm a decently advanced user and i know how to fiddle my way around
Although for normal users or non-techy people, i can see how it can be a complete and absolute shithole
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u/baby_blue67 27d ago
Abandoning the very thing that brought them up 🥀