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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

I think most people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex computer use feature. It's incredibly useful. I can remote in from the app, voice it instructions, then let it work in the background. When I tell it "draft a reply to this email (which it has access to thru the gmail connector) and attach the latest docs" or "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files saved in the folder", it just asks for the relevant info and handles the rest. It opens its internal web browser and programmatically fills out the forms.

It gets the task done in 5-10 minutes. It's it bit slow since I'm not paying extra for ultrafast mode, but it gets the job done. Frees up the brain to do other tasks.

It's exactly like vibe coding but for computer tasks.

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Using Work/Codex I'm continually amazed at how far my experience is from the popular AI memes like "this will destroy all jobs" and "AI is useless and is about to crash and take the economy with it."

My experience feels like I'm in an Iron Man movie. I get up in the morning, I turn on the voice chat mode, and while I'm making my coffee I ask it to highlight any important emails I received overnight. I then babble to it a bit with my initial reactions to those emails, and tell it to draft responses based on my thoughts, which it does.

By the time I start work I've got draft emails to review and I've had time to think about the ideas a bit more, the upshot is that I'll get a day's worth of email done in 20 minutes and probably make better decisions than I would have otherwise. By no means does this eliminate my job, just make me better at it and more productive. I can get into the day's deep work sooner now.

Going into that two-way voice mode with all your Connectors available is a big part of the gain here, sometimes you just want to walk and talk through something. It seems you can't get both of those simultaneously in the mobile app yet and when you can that'll be a huge gain, like go take a walk in the garden, talk through your thoughts, the appropriate drafts and other artifacts are ready for you to finalize when you return to your desk. This stuff is honestly space age.

I don't have much experience with Claude so if it also has that two way voice mode and can use its version of Connectors on mobile while that's turned on, I should give it another shot.

Not to come across as dismissive of your job, but if a "day's worth of email" can be done in 20 minutes now, it to me mostly highlights that it was mostly busy-work with little value and could have had another process? Good that AI improved upon the old process, though.

Assuming your first sentence is accurate, I would disagree with the second. Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation. The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster. That still wastes resources and stresses the system, which makes it worse by hiding problems that will bite you in the future.

For example, say you deal with 100 emails a day. 90 of those are pointless busy-work and 10 are meaningful. It takes you all day. Now you begin using an LLM. You still have to separate the 90 from the 10 but then have the LLM reply with the 90 and leave the 10 for yourself because they are important and you have to make sure they’re done right. It now takes you a fraction of the day, so what happens is you start taking on more and more email¹. You’re now at 300 a day, with 270 busy-work and 30 meaningful (same ratio as before). Then one day your LLM breaks (ran out of tokens; a model was retired; bad connection; your powerful local machine broke down) and now you’re flooded by email and don’t even have time to separate the bad from the good, let alone prioritise and reply. If you had instead fixed the busy-work problem, you’d have been fine.

¹ Let’s be real: Work expands to fill the allotted time (Parkinson's Law). Those selling increases in productivity always promise more free time but what always happens is more work.

> The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster.

Good luck trying to bring this through your typical bigco process management. Either your initiative dies, having gotten caught in a spider web of red tape, or it succeeds but now half your colleagues are angry at you to the point there's a non-zero chance of you getting beaten up, because now they have to do actual work or leave the niche they have made themselves comfortable coasting in for 20 years.

Office politics is even worse than actual politics.

“You won’t have luck implementing a sensible solution on a dysfunctional system” is an evergreen answer which doesn’t offer any insight. It’s a cop-out and discourages any attempts at improving anything.

Not everyone works for big corporations, and of those who do some work in departments with sensible bosses where they can make some change.

As an exaggerated example, we could also say “one way to resolve issues in a community is to gather the people involved and have them talk through their issues in a room with an experienced impartial mediator to help guide the discussion” and then have someone reply “good luck trying that at a maximum security prison where inmates are constantly confined to solitary and beaten by the officers”. Yeah, no shit. You have to adapt your solutions to your environment, but that’s no reason to dismiss a general starting concept.

Having a name for these "thought-killing statements" or "thought-terminating cliches" has helped me recognize them in all sorts of settings in my life. Corporate, social, religious, the list goes on.

It makes sense as humans that we do many things to simplify things or even eliminate them in order to save energy and avoid stress, and we should be careful to recognize a need for balance while still working towards some greater goal, purpose, or good.

Even so, much like kerning, once you are aware of it, it is painfully difficult to ignore.

+1, I see it very clearly at my SO work.

Half of her organization has just a calendar filled with meetings.

And without meeting the organization would find that you only really need a third of the people, and you would even likely increase the overall output.

Many time wastes are just designed to make people busy, not productive.

Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation.

This gent can Minesweep his extra free time and not tell his bosmang "I finished my day in 20 mins, what else you got?"

I appreciate your comment honestly, the

Those selling increases in productivity always promise more free time but what always happens is more work.

But the real is real, so now what? Better faster AI? Just curious, replying in good humor. Cheers.

Don't confuse "Ben can answer these emails in 20 minutes" with "anyone could answer these emails in 20 minutes"

Imagine you could get Elon to answer your emails. Is that perfectly interchangeable with any other human?

It's kinda my point, though, that it's busy "manager" work if it really can be answered by an LLM. So yeah, getting answer from someone like Elon is exactly as useful as just asking the LLM myself.

I mean, I can't stop people from emailing me. I get over a hundred non-spam, non-mailing-list emails on some days. I'm not able to respond to most of them. I'm often not expected to, I'm just being copied in as a FYI. The AI is able to assess subject and intent well enough to determine what should receive my limited time, and through the voice interface it converts "making coffee" time into "composing email" time. I do read every email that's sent to me eventually, but it can take several weeks in some cases. I don't let AI reply to anything for me, but I'm happy to have it propose a draft.

I'm using mu4e as my MUA and one the things that it offers are actions (something similar in mutt is macro) where you can map a keybind to some code that do something to the current message or the set of selected messages. This is generally the reason that a lot of mailing list recipients (high volume of messages) use those software, where you can refile messages very quickly leaving the more thoughtful reply things for later.

I think something concerning is that your email has become a sluth and for people wanting to contact you and not your AI agent how do they break through that 2FA step

I feel like in near future the meme about "it's all just chatbots emailing each other" will actually be true. I wonder when I will receive my first AI generated email and will I bother to respond to it at all

It's already here. My company received an AI generated bug report the other day, and my AI employee ("R. Axiom") noticed, analyzed it, prepared a fix, tested it and replied to it. I wasn't involved, although I will review, merge and release the fix.

An agent with full access to your codebase is able to email out without supervision in response to an untrusted messsage?

Surely passing untrusted input to a agent with execution capabilities and also possibility to reply to the same author, couldn't possibly be used for anything negative? Parent is probably using a firewall so it's A-OK :thumbs_up:

What a wild ride huh.

We're in the "fuck it we ball" era.

Not even the many reports of prompt injection and takeover due to IA misfeatures can cheer me up anymore.

It is all incredibly sad.

> Surely passing untrusted input to a agent with execution capabilities

Oh hey, I know this one! It’s humans and a phishing test, they’ll click on all the links and enter information without checking the domain properly!

Personally, I’d like systems that aren’t open to attack and can be depended upon. But it seems like nowadays NOTHING can be trusted - not OSes (recent Qubes OS exploit, not even mentioning others), not any software written in languages without memory safety, not even the ones with (Log4j comes to mind), not the packages in many package managers, not other humans and sure as hell not the token prediction machines. What a world.

We all probably live with a 0.XX% chance of getting pwned any given day.

> But it seems like nowadays NOTHING can be trusted - not OSes (recent Qubes OS exploit, not even mentioning others),

Clearly you feel alarmed, but it's important to base these "alarm" feelings on actual evidence and real concrete proof of something being bad. You clearly don't have a proper understanding of the exploit, so please take a moment to re-read what actually happened and how it would be exploited in practice, particularly the "the scope of this attack is smaller than it sounds" comment chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49496918

Overall, I agree with you though, and it's a healthy perspective to be safer rather than sorrier, so living with the assumption that getting pwned any day is a non-zero chance/risk is probably the best approach and what I personally do too.

Yes!

We'll see how it goes, but the product in question (Conveyor) is a downloadable tool that's got deliberately unobfuscated bytecode in it, with lots of detailed logging. AI is perfectly capable of reverse engineering it and in fact this bug report contained such a reversing. So even if someone tricks it into revealing source code or similar, they won't get anything that isn't already obtainable via other methods. This isn't a SaaS where security through obscurity might conceivably help, or where the codebase might contain credentials by mistake.

It's a developer tool and this level of trust helps customers debug their own problems quickly. If someone wants to break the law, they'll get a legal answer, but it's never been a problem.

The bot in question cannot write to master though, only open up pull requests from its own isolated repository.

It's a bet on modern models being more resistant to confusion attacks than they were before. The harness setup also makes it very clear to the model where input comes from. This might be a bad bet, but if it's not, then it's helpful for customers to get help right away.

Is "R. Axiom" inspired by "A. Bettik" from Hyperion? I love the name :)

More likely inspired by Asimov's names (R. Daneel, etc.) from his Robots stories.

Correct! I think we need a naming convention that lets us quickly understand if we're talking to a human or a machine. The R. prefix (meaning Robot) is unobtrusive and familiar to anyone who has encountered Asimov's stories. It will also generalize to humanoid LLM/VLA powered actual robots in future.

We get tons of AI generated emails. They're almost universally deleted without reply.

When do you get to enjoy your morning? And when does your family get to enjoy time with you? You're working when you wake up, working while you make coffee, working while you walk through the garden. Is that really space age? It sounds more like TikTok doomscrolling but for techies.

IMO these tools introduce faux productivity while taking away your free time and making you work more.

It's not the techs fault. This person chose to use it this way. They could have also carved out 20 mins at the start of their workday to do the same thing

I disagree. They could've carved out 20 minutes at the start of their workday to do the same thing, but that's explicitly at the start of their workday – not during their free time. I don't know anything about this person, but I know that if I were using these tools the way they do, it would mean the complete obliteration of what little semblance of work/life balance that I have left.

> space age

I agree with your comment, but I'm curious about this term as it seems anachronistic but maybe there is a new use?

As someone who hasn't used Work or Codex but has used Claude Code and Pi a lot, may you describe how to set this up? I'm interested enough to try this out

You'll need a subscription ($20 tier should be fine) and then need to add "connectors" to your services (Gmail, 365, etc) so that it can access them. Then you just use the Claude Cowork (Or ChatGPT equivalent) tabs and chat with it.

You do not even need a subscription. Even ChatGPT free account has some quota for Codex/Work use.

I wasn't aware of that. I am aware that Google connectors are gated behind the $20 ChatGPT sub.

I just signed into https://chatgpt.com using my burner free account and I don't see a "Work" tab.

Do you know if free tier gets ChatGPT desktop app access to Codex and Work? And if that Work access is local-only or includes Work Cloud?

It might be hidden somewhere or they’re doing A/B testing. Cowork was part of the left sidebar for Claude but when I was looking for it, it was gone. I had to do a search query to find it.

Random but I have no idea how this comment of yours ended up dead. I ended up vouching for it.

I consider myself fairly AI native. I was absolutely blown away by how frictionless it felt the other day interfacing with codex using the experimental headless app server on my VPS and using voice mode on my phone connected to it while I had my browser open having a conversation about making edits to my website.

The site uses Astro to hot load edits and so the exceptional Live voice model would use some filler words in response to me asking for an edit and before I knew it, the page had refreshed with the fix.

When people talk about things like OpenClaw and Hermes being a new operating system paradigm this is the sort of UX that comes to mind.

And simply conversing with it with my phone in my pocket and air pods on its the closest I've felt to a live conversation with AI ever.

Kudos to the voice mode and Live voice model teams.

"Going into that two-way voice mode" How does that work in codex? I know the dictate function, can't find anything else.

If it hasn't accidentally sent one of your drafts yet, then I can see how you're comfortable with that.

I think the whole world is sleeping on the privacy/security implications of this technology. Recent OpenAI/HuggingFace incident shows us that even in a very controlled top AI-lab setting, humans can't know what agents are really doing. In our consumer environments at home or work we don't even have access to reasoning logs or background agents/tools. What they do gets more opaque and convoluted every day. When I grant access to gmail, it basically has access to every single mail in my account. When it has computer use or terminal use it can basically do anything on my computer. It's like keeping your home/office doors unlocked. You may think you live in a very safe neighborhood. Until someone needs to take something from inside (or worse, plant something).

Yes. Don’t get me wrong: I use and enjoy these LLMs. But even now, well into 2026, I’m still using them via the now “old-fashioned” chat box in a web browser. Based on all that we’ve learned about this technology, there’s just no way I’m giving it control over any part of my machine. Is it a helpful search engine? Does it save me typing and write some nice code snippets when I need it to? Absolutely it does, and I greatly appreciate the technology. But I’m just not ready to create agents and let them run. I just think that’s still way too risky, and I fear a major, major catastrophe is coming because of how so many people recklessly trust these agents. I certainly hope I’m wrong.

last week i finally bit the bullet and did the vm thing and my harness exclusively lives in there now, no more env files for local dev keychain access only which is requiring a lot of input from me but oh well. i'm 100% web browser chat on my host system. i cannot afford to have my world compromised and i stalled on setting that up for way too long. all of these major services are inevitably going to get compromised they're just adding too many surfaces constantly it's insane. i also ejected node/npm the fuck out of my world after the recent shai halud. In this "AI is assisting in finding vulnerabilities" era i'm just like done with the exposure. keeping vendored copies of any libs i need and mostly just use go now and making stuff that is effectively distroless for deployment and my build chain is pretty much just compiling my go, and even with go im carefully looking at packages theres so many packages appearing out of thin air now all vibe coded no reputation.

Me too, it is a crystal clear boundary between me and the LLM. They might have access to my most precious code, but at least they don't have access to my browsing history.

You don't have to go to the HuggingFace incident! Go back in time to the New York Times legal brawl where NYT lawyers started being able to scoop up all their logs not covered by a ZDR. That's what keeps me from giving OpenAI access to anything too personal. My employer offers to let us use our corporate seats for personal stuff so we can be covered by our corporate ZDR, but AFAIK that enables HR to see all my chats which is just as bad or worse. (Someone in HR in ChatGPT Work: "Create a scheduled task where every morning at 8AM you navigate to the compliance tab in the corporate ChatGPT dashboard and search for anyone asking questions about job opportunities outside the company, or [list of 100 other prohibited things], and alert me with any positive results.")

Looking forward to seeing what Apple cooks up with their Private Cloud Compute and if anyone else takes up the same approach.

You can have OpenRouter filter for ZDR providers. There are nuances like contractual ZDR vs technical ZDR but definitely worth investigating

exactly, and contractual can mean anything

the providers are actually still training on data, using a concept called Generate Data Refinement that thye've publisehd: https://trustedrouter.com/blog/they-are-still-training-on-yo...

The parent gives the model access to passport and presumably other sensitive info. That's enough for a new Black Mirror episode.

> Recent OpenAI/HuggingFace incident shows us that even in a very controlled top AI-lab setting, humans can't know what agents are really doing.

“very controlled” is disinformation.

Yep. As is "can't know".

> I think most people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex computer use feature.

One of the root causes most people are "sleeping", is most probably why we're here now: the feature is marketed in such a confusing way to the general public, that it takes a post on a personal blog to actually explain it.

ChatGPT has been suggesting Work in the middle of some intense working sessions. Finally, I took some spare 30mn to research exactly this on ChatGPT, no later than this weekend: what does Work have that Chat doesn't have?

It should be simple enough for someone using it for work. They say it's great, and I still need to set time aside (from my real work) to research how great it is?

> It's it bit slow since I'm not paying extra for ultrafast mode

Contrary to its name, "ultrafast" isn't faster than the rest, and many times slower than "max", as it'll "fork out" to a bunch of sub-agents and wait for them, + does extra "red-teaming" and more.

I think "ultrafast" is not referring to the speed of the "model" (harness in reality, as it's all the same model as "max") but rather how fast it consumes your usage limits.

There is definitely a separate "Fast" mode that the app claims to yield a x1.5 speed increase (I have not tested it) with more token consumption.

I believe you refer to the "Ultra" mode that does what you say and it is also mentioned in the blog post, but I don't think the two modes are related.

> There is definitely a separate "Fast" mode that the app claims to yield a x1.5 speed increase (I have not tested it) with more token consumption.

Ah yes, I guess the portmanteau confused me and I assumed they were talking about "Ultra" the "reasoning effort" (which it isn't), rather than the "fast mode" which supposedly gives you priority over "non-fast mode requests". Although in practice, counter-intuitively, sometimes being in non-fast mode gives you faster replies than fast-mode, haven't got a feeling for why/when though.

He isn't talking about ultra mode which you are.

He said "ultrafast" which has nothing to do with subagents. It's a new API tier where it runs on a different inference backend to get you faster token/s.

Huh, yeah, it's not just a portmanteau of "fast" mode + "ultra" reasoning but something completely different, you're right: https://openai.com/index/previewing-ultrafast/

OpenAI really is the worst at naming stuff.

I am not sure I understand how this is better from using Claude Code from the mobile app.

Or Codex from the ChatGPT app.

If you have supplied tooling on your system, you have access to all of this and more.

I think the idea is most people don’t have a machine up and available, nor maintain skills for interacting with their core services?

One thing that keeps me from adopting codex more deeply is the architecture around mobile access.

Claude Code makes this trivial /rc and you are done.

Codex requires you run the desktop app and additional authentication requirements. The result of this has been codex is almost always relegated to fleet worker rather than orchestrator.

I wonder if the emphasis on this work feature has something to do w the persistent hurdles to remote control if codex sessions.

Codex with computer use, yes. GP mentioned it.

> Codex requires you run the desktop app and additional authentication requirements. The result of this has been codex is almost always relegated to fleet worker rather than orchestrator.

I’m often using my MBP but also the Mac Studio remotely via the mobile app. What’s missing in your mind?

> Codex requires you run the desktop app and additional authentication requirements.

It also doesn't work at all in my experience. Same Wi-Fi, different network, screen on or locked with "prevent sleep", I just get randomly disconnected all the time.

Or, I mean, reading and responding to emails on your phone directly

> "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files saved in the folder"

It's both awesome and scary at the same time to realising that most AI these days can work on something like this that's official and tedious, and probably not screw up too much (or do better at it than some people with fat fingers).

Less bureaucracy should be the focus of AI marketing, rather than global superintelligent robots or smut generation

Bureaucracy is a major part of many corporate leader’s roles. That might not be the best sales line

And that is exactly why AI marketing touts ability to replace programmers, when in reality it is much better suited to replace middle management between client and programmers...

Lets just not redo subscription gods

They are better at many things I‘m a novice at. At least at the operational level. I can’t rely on the semantics being fully correct because they tend to get subtle things wrong or just don’t ask. Like tax forms - not a good idea to put them on full auto. You‘ll leave money on the table.

> It's exactly like vibe coding but for computer tasks.

That’s precisely why I don’t use it. LLMs are still not reliable enough for me to trust them with my actual system.

Are you not worried giving it full control of your computer? I would be terrified. If I’ve got my eyes on it, I can at least stop it before it does something stupid.

agreed on the notion that

> people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex

just in general. I find it to be far superior (imo) for all tasks atm. Claude just overdoes things in writing, coding, architecture, etc

I feel like at least some of this is inspired by OpenClaw or at least driven by Peter Steinberger, as these benefits and ideas sound very similar as what he described his work in a few interviews before these features existed in ChatGPT Work.

I expect OpenClaw was a huge influence on this, and on Claude Cowork too.

OpenClaw demonstrated that there was enormous existing demand for general agent functionality, such that people would buy a whole Mac mini just to get access to this shape of tool.

Didn't OpenAI hire him? I thought it was not a secret that OpenClaw was the biggest influence.

I mean, it's all just tool calls and context-management in the end. Like it is pretty self-evident to have a "heartbeat" and to do specific stuff on a schedule, etc.

> draft a reply to this email

If a botted reply is OK, why do they email you instead of the bot?

Since the word "draft" was used, it is safe to assume that the message will be reviewed and potentially amended before being sent.

I wish the Gmail connector that OpenAi offers had a read only mode.

I get fantastic mileage of regular ChatGPT Plus chat connected to all of my public and private Github - I have about 900 repos - probably about 100 relevant ones. I can work from any computer/phone.

This workflow sort of happened over the last few months. Until now I was very hesitant to grant commit rights.

However, I am still afraid to give OpenAi full read/write access to my gmail.

Is there a way to give read and say draft only access to OpenAi? I do not want OpenAi sending emails on my behalf.

is Work that much better than standard ChatGPT? I just tried standard for a relatively simple task; searching through the used market for a Macbook Pro and it alternated between ignoring my requirements (which was the whole reason I used it in the first place, as eBay does the same) and doing this weird thing where it'd suggest the "concept" of something (eg "X at Y price is a great choice" with no link to X at Y price).

So yeh, is Work much better for that kind of thing?

Yes! This is because work mode can store information in a local file then reuse them later.

Maybe for the occasional something. If I had an actual workflow i'd prefer a dedicated tool over the newest chatgpt "do everything" app.

That's the thing though. There are very few "actual workflows" in many people's lives (especially if you exclude their job), and many many "one off (few off) workflow". That's the magic.

So many tasks I need to do once, or just a few times ever, but they build up. While I'm not sure I'd use it for immigration forms specifically, that's the kind of task that's tedious and done rarely, so a dedicated tool doesn't help because who would be familiar with that tool and have it handy?

Let the minions create scripts for you.

> fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files saved in the folder

I would never send my passport details to OpenAI. That's a lot of trust you have on the tech and the company behind it.

Is it not significantly more token hungry at the same time?

Sol Light on computer use is fantastic. I use it whenever I need to dive deep into whatever shitty web saas app menu if the API is unavailable

How are you sure it fills out the multi step form correctly?

Computer use gets a video of the browser screen with a timeline scrubber.

They are not sleeping. They are rejecting a double trojan horse that stores your data in the cloud and exfiltrates it to an LLM.

I have no words seeing someone on a software engineering site recommend using it for personal data.

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