Developer Simon Willison published a practical field guide to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work after weeks of iteration following the July 9 announcement. He splits the product into Work Cloud (chatgpt.com / mobile) and Work Local (desktop app formerly associated with Codex) and notes both currently require paid tiers at $20/month and up. Work Cloud’s differentiators versus plain Chat include alternate model routes (GPT-5.6 Sol/Luna/Terra with multiple reasoning levels), code execution with internet access, a headless Chrome browser, a persistent filesystem across sessions, ChatGPT Sites publishing, and sub-agents.
Willison argues OpenAI’s marketing split (“Chat for answers, Work for outcomes”) is fuzzy because Chat already drafted decks and analyses for years — the real story is the toolbelt. For builders, internet-connected code execution alone is a major step past classic Code Interpreter isolation.
Source: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/30/understanding-chatgpt-work/