ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Classic

I wonder if John from the ChatGPT Atlas team will comment here again :)

"It’s a live ongoing attachment, so as the attached document/note changes, ChatGPT sees the changes"

The new version of ChatGPT still has that and uses accessibility for it. It uses a separate app called Codex Computer Use to enable the feature in the regular ChatGPT app.

"I don’t think it exists on any platform but the Mac."

The Windows version has the same feature, fwiw.

"The ChatGPT Classic app looks more native Mac-like, so that might be an issue for users."

Aesthetically, they look practically the same. But the non-native version feels much snappier.

"And as a Codex user, I resent having my Codex deleted"

I suspect most people who seriously use OpenAI's models for development never used Codex (the app) in the first place.

I upgraded to the new version and immediately reverted. I like having Chat and Codex as separate apps. The new app downgrades chat down to almost nothing, I have no idea what they were thinking.

I like native apps but the 'Native' ChatGPT wasn't very good. It was very easy to right click and delete the wrong chat because they don't draw the proper focus ring around the right clicked item in the sidebar. Text on popovers also often not readable in light mode.

> (It’s almost like Apple doesn’t have clear messaging on the right way to build native desktop apps anymore, and, if Apple doesn’t know, why on earth would third-party developers make that investment)

Ya. I don't even want to make native apps anymore because Apple has been telling me for years that the way I make apps isn't "the best way." Obviously I don't believe them and I think the people making these calls are dopes but I also don't want to invest heavily in their APIs. I have no idea if/when they are going to deprecate a bunch of shit out from under me and leave me scrambling. I see these new crash reports all with Swift symbols underneath (APIs that use to be ObjC) - rewriting shit for no reason. Replace the iOS simulator. Introduce weird shit nobody asked for or cares about like Device Hub and just yell SwiftUI SWIFTUI SWIFTUI from th

Almost nobody w

@Anonymous

Like with any large enterprise, people need to show "impact". How do you show "impact" with existing frameworks and software that has been functioning just fine for decades? "Solving tech debt" by rewriting shit from one language to another. Rewrite working stuff into half assed shit. They rewrote the underlying engine of Interface Builder to use simulator instead. So every time you open an iOS storyboard or xib, you wait minutes and your computer's fans move hot air, because it has to boot an entire iOS subsystem just to render a few views. (Don't you dare remember that they have UIKit compiled as macOS frameworks!). You run the new simulator "Device" "Hub" and you press CMD+T, which used to be mapped as the menu item of "Slow animations", but now it opens a new tab, because the clowns that wrote this used a SwiftUI template, but they don't understand macOS, so of course, it breaks the whole app. And you look for all the useful features they had for debugging stuff, and of course, none of that exists in "Device" "Hub" because the clowns that wrote it probably didn't use these features, so who cares, right? And they rewrote the Xcode theme, and of course, they used SwiftUI, and of course, font selection is broken because SwiftUI can't maintain a proper responder chain in place, and of course, there is no option to export the new themes because it's a half assed Apple shitshow, likely vibecoded, like "Device" "Hub". Maybe in 3 years, some other kiddie will decide to show "impact" by rewriting these features, and maybe they will do better.

@Léo What’s getting me is that it seems there’s no longer a way to use a dark background in Xcode without making the UI itself dark.

@Michael I think it's possible, but would be a lot of work. If you click on the background color picker, there is an eyedropper icon, which switches from … whatever it is to a more standard color picker, as well as a hex text field appears, where you can put #000000 to get a black background. But then you'd have to go and edit all colors to be light (using the same procedure). And don't make a mistake later, because you can't export any of it.

I really don't understand who "designed" this shitshow. Even an intern would have the common sense to make it more logical than whatever there is in Xcode 27.

> Device Hub and just yell SwiftUI SWIFTUI SWIFTUI from th

Sorry my comment got cut off. Was banging on the keys like a drum rage typing (happens sometimes when I think about SwiftUI) and I accidentally hit tab-enter and send my comment in…

What was I going to say..not sure I blacked out!

I'm not fond of the integration because it breaks my mental model:
- Chats are distinct and there's no good way to manage them in the new version.
- I don't want unrelated conversations appearing next to work projects.
- I don't want "memories" of one-off things influencing work projects.

However, ChatGPT Classic is now getting weird praise it doesn't deserve. It's had big bugs for a while:
- It frequently forgets state. The sidebar and conversations often close on their own.
- Huge memory leaks. Leave it running and do nothing and observe it taking GB more days later.
- For the longest time deleting a conversation also hides an unrelated conversation until relaunch.

There's a whole lot of bad no matter what app combo you use.

> I suspect most people who seriously use OpenAI's models for development never used Codex (the app) in the first place.

I do. I've bounced around from VS Code to Terminal-only to Codex. They all work, but Codex offers a nice UI. XCode's Coding Assistant is the bottom of the barrel.

@Léo It does keep the UI light when I change the background to black that way. But as soon as I import my old theme that customizes all the colors it flips the UI to dark. I assume that if I entered all the hex colors manually it would eventually do that, too. But who knows? The theming UI is buggy in addition to being weird.

@Hammer - I agree wrt the Xcode coding assistant.

It’s fine, sort of. But it’s severely lagging behind what I see in Rider, and people have been very critical of JetBrains for lagging behind themselves. What Xcode has would have been acceptable in 2023.

It seems like the foundational cracks are really starting to show. Apple can’t be innovative or even just keep up in the software department any more, and it’s truly heartbreaking when I look back at how much I marveled at the system apps and iLife and iWork in the 2000s.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but swift was a huge mistake. SwiftUI made the situation even worse. It was entirely predictable that we’d end up here - confused on how to build applications, and those predictions were recorded in the comments on this very site.

Steve Jobs and the NEXT boys decided long ago that dynamic dispatch and object oriented programming was how applications would be developed. 2014 was way too late to decide to throw everything away and start over.

SwiftUI needs a complete reboot, an entirely new API. And the system frameworks need to move towards a component registry kind of system.

The newer app does seem a bit more responsive on my PC. But for some reason they made the idiotic choice to NOT include existing Projects in the new app? What? So they want me to switch to the new app, but all my 1+ years of projects are not there? Baffling.

> The newer app does seem a bit more responsive on my PC

The native Mac ChatGPT wasn't too bad to use, but after switching back to it from the web-tech one, you really notice how much faster the web-tech one responds to clicks. I also notice that none of the complaints I've seen leveled against the web-tech one are related to the actual tech stack. It's mostly just people who prefer individual apps.

> I do. I've bounced around from VS Code to Terminal-only to Codex.

Since OpenAI allows third-party harnesses like opencode or pi, I don't see a reason to use any of these other options. It also lets you run the harness in a VM and create its own PRs, so there's no problem with running this stuff locally.

I was very annoyed by moving the chats into the small popup window, but you can actually just chat to the "Playground" (whatever that is) like before.

I'm probably a bad use case for all of the "mac-assed" app people. I work on Windows, Linux, and macOS every day and don't care about an application following the system standards nearly as much as I care about the application being written well. Sometimes that requires it follow the system conventions, see things like menu bar apps, Dropbox, etc. But sometimes it requires not following system standards if they conflict with the purpose of the app and/or working the same everywhere.

I value that VSCode, Sublime Text/Merge, DaVinci Resolve, etc works the same on all of my platforms.

"The UI is just slop" is a funny complaint from someone who presumably opened the app in order to… generate some slop.

I find it amusing that when you open a chat in a separate window to 'Go Back' to the list of all your chats you click a forward arrow.

In the list of chats right clicking on a chat does nothing so you cannot delete a chat from this interface. I mean the models do what they do and that's why everyone is here but boy do these people suck at making apps. No effort at all.

It will be noted (eventually, by somebody, somewhere) that one happy consequence of the Electronification is support for Intel macOS. Truly, we live in wonderful times when newer versions of software support older operating systems and platforms.

But, yeah, it's mostly a downgrade and I now alternate between the webapp and CLI.

I have a new discovery to add (somebody may have already mentioned this) but...

1) Open a new window in ChatGPT.
2) With two independent windows open change the mode from "Codex" to "ChatGPT" in one window.
3) Observe that mode is changed to "ChatGPT" in both windows.

That's cool.