M.G. Siegler • #openai • Jul 10, 2026

The ChatGPT "Super App" Sort of Super Sucks

Even if it's ultimately the right call, the new Mac app is a mess...

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.

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.

Yes, the "Super App" is here. Unfortunately, it super sucks.

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.

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.

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

But to me, the bigger issue is the UI choices.

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.

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.

My god this is stupid branding. It's not bad in the way Microsoft branding is often bad. It's just dumb.

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?

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.

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!

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.

Yes, 'Chat' is now a buried sub-menu feature of ChatGPT.

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.

But crazier still is that clicking on 'Chat' doesn't take you into the good, old ChatGPT chat area we know and love, instead it launches a pop-up box from the bottom of the window. A goddamn pop-up! Yes, I suppose this is a known 'chat' paradigm. But it's one that sucks!

And while you can pop-out the box into its own window (there you are, old friend), there's also a 'minimize' button which doesn't actually minimize the window into some sort of bottom toolbar like you might expect, but instead it just closes the window. You can also move the chat window around in the ChatGPT app environment, which is different from popping it out to move it around (which naturally has its own, different minimize/maximize/close toggles per normal macOS window standards). I mean, what?

But the reason why OpenAI was undoubtedly okay doing all this is even more confusing! Because while it's labeled as a 'task' rather than a 'chat' you can still just chat with ChatGPT in the chat box even when in task mode as you normally would in the old ChatGPT. How's that for a sentence? In other words, as best I can tell, you can use 'ChatGPT Work' just as you used to use ChatGPT itself. The phrasing is all different and confusing "Do anything" is the new "Ask ChatGPT" prompt in the box – I get the sentiment, but come on, "Do anything"?! – but it works.

Okay, that's 1,100 words shitting on this update. I will say something nice: the new model toggle, which is now just a slider for you to indicate where on the spectrum from 'Faster' to 'Smarter' you want to be, is pretty nice. There are still way too many options – six! – but it's better than having to choose a model name/number.²

I'm only a few hours in, but I seriously think that's the only nice thing I have to say about this change. Again, I understand why they're doing it, but I just thought they would do this more gracefully.

Honestly, they're probably a bit trapped. Given the recent success Anthropic is seeing – and the numbers OpenAI themselves are seeing with their own Codex product – they obviously feel the need to make these changes, but given all of the above, they probably should have changed the name from 'ChatGPT'. At the same time, they undoubtedly couldn't do that because they have so much mindshare with it – it's the 'Kleenex' of AI right now. So even though ChatGPT now has little to do with chat, here we are.

Oh yes, and have I mentioned that the new web experience for ChatGPT is entirely different? The web app defaults to, you guessed it – or perhaps not! – 'Chat'. There's a toggle at the top (which is a completely different UI than the Mac app) to move to 'Work'. Not 'ChatGPT Work' mind you, as it is in the new app, just 'Work'. (I suppose they wanted to avoid the embarrassment of having to label the other box 'ChatGPT Chat'.) And yet there is no option for 'Codex' (though presumably that will come at some point, with Anthropic also moving such tools to the web).

It's a cleaner and more straightforward UI – even if the 'Chat' and 'Work' toggle also still make it seem too much like a 'work and play' dynamic. So one presumes OpenAI's assumption is that anyone willing to download the Mac app will be intending to do work – meaning not necessarily actual "work" but instead just general agentic uses. Meanwhile, anyone more casually looking to chat will most likely just use the web. I guess that's fine, but it's confusing, and yes, sucks. Because I would often use the previous version of the Mac app as my go-to always-on chat app (using the option-space shortcut to bring up the nice mini overlay). The new settings area of the new app is so convoluted it's almost Microsoft-ian, if not Facebook-ian in nature.

Speaking of, with these changes, my mind goes back in time to when Facebook rolled out the News Feed. This is that jarring of a change. Obviously, despite the backlash at the time, that ended up being one of the best calls Meta ever made as a company. Perhaps this shift from chat to "work" will be the same for OpenAI. At the highest level, moving beyond simple chat – to voice and other paradigms – makes sense. But it's too convoluted and messy to see it right now.

Bigger picture: I worry that ChatGPT is ceding the consumer AI space. Or worse, that they just intend to take their massive foothold and milk it for needed revenue by shoving ads into our faces. Potentially even more problematic for OpenAI: this is just as Meta and Apple are nearly ready to pick up that potential slack. I already thought that the new Siri AI was going to end up as the default chatbot for many if not most Apple users, simply thanks to its default (and finally "good enough") status. Now I'm even more sure of it because ChatGPT has become such a mess on the Mac.

Let's see what they do – or hopefully don't do – with mobile...

One more thing: Nearly lost in yesterday's flurry of releases is the news that Atlas, OpenAI's not-even-year-old web browser, will also be no more. While it launched to much fanfare last October, the reality remains that it's just an insanely hard area in which to compete, perhaps the hardest, given Google's dominance with Chrome on desktop. I actually quite liked Atlas and would often use it as a secondary web browser (after Dia, still my preferred "AI Browser"). But that was mainly because it was fast relative to the comically bloated Chrome and too-resource-cautious Safari.

As expected, Atlas does live on, in a way, inside of this new ChatGPT app, but good luck finding it! Here's a hint, it's in the 'side panel' which you have to toggle on via a button in the upper right corner of the app. Here, you'll also find the ability to have a "Side task" (which is a concept I like, but come on, "Side chat" was right there!). Atlas, if it's even still called that, is now about as bare-bones as a browser can be and seems mainly to exist for agentic purposes. Which I guess makes sense.

Oh, there's also a 'bottom panel' where the browser and side tasks can reside alongside the Terminal. In a way, the new ChatGPT app is like the new Windows!

So if the goal was for the "Super App" to be the new, convoluted operating system,³ mission accomplished, I guess?

👇

Previously, on Spyglass...

¹ Thankfully, it seems that, at least for now, you can have both the old ChatGPT app and new ChatGPT app installed at once – but you need to be careful to rename the old one first because they new one, with the same name, will override it! ↩

² How will the masses feel about such a change? We'll see! ↩

³ Complete with a hidden away "File Tree"! ↩