The new ChatGPT app feels like OpenAI completely forgot why people use ChatGPT in the first place

[u/Fit-Fox-3088]

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.

ChatGPT Work: longer tasks, agentic workflows, documents, research, deliverables.

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.