Simon Willison
61K posts

Simon Willison
@simonw
Creator @datasetteproj, co-creator Django. PSF board. Hangs out with @natbat. He/Him. Mastodon: https://t.co/t0MrmnJW0K Bsky: https://t.co/OnWIyhX4CH
San Francisco, CA Katılım Kasım 2006
5.7K Takip Edilen196.6K Takipçiler

@pvncher @MarcosHernanz It's confusing how Work vs Codex in the desktop app is just cosmetic, but Work vs Chat in the iPhone app is radically different
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@MarcosHernanz Its not just for general users. The dropdown allows us to build two product views, one for devs and one for general users. There’s a lot of overlap but still many distinctions.
For instance, check the new pull request tab that is only for codex mode.
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Codex app is becoming an app for general users.
And the TUI sucks.
Who's building an alternative?
Tibo@thsottiaux
If you were using Codex before, two things to do 1. Keep using Codex. It is for you 2. Tell your friends and family about ChatGPT Work who you always wanted to show Codex but they’re not as technical and don’t work with code every day and tell me how it goes
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@TimTeaFan I think one fundamental issue here is accountability: it makes no sense to try and hold a bunch of matrix arithmetic accountable for something
If you're hiring employees you need to be able to hold them accountable for their actions
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I would like to disagree, especially bc what we see where model capabilities are going and what agents like open claw and Hermes can do. it might not be much now, but it will (and does) surpass any spreadsheet. and on the other side you basically have intelligence degrading on the human side idk for the US but in Germany it is not easy to hire capable ppl.
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@_xjdr would strongly encourage *not* running in yolo mode and instead run it with auto review instead
learn.chatgpt.com/docs/sandboxin…
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my biggest take away from gpt5.6 so far (and fable to some extent as well) is that you only get a fraction of the value without running in --yolo mode (subagents that require approvals aren't any more useful than just running the prompts yourself) and as a staunch --yolo mode denier (legacy review every diff unc), i am finding this dichotomy difficult to cope with . i knew this was coming, and i've been preparing for it (its like 60% of the long term thesis behind code.noumena.com) but i didn't think it was already here.
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@emollick I had an argument with it about this where it appeared to be taking the instructions around quoting from web search results and interpreting them as applying to all other sources (like documents I uploaded to it) as well

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@emollick Fable 5 is particularly strict about not quoting more than 15 words from sources, which is absolutely infuriating when you're doing research and want it to quote the original sources to help support claims that it makes in its responses
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Looks like the line from OpenAI insiders is the at it's purely a UI thing, not a difference in capabilities
Andrew Ambrosino@ajambrosino
@simonw capabilities and histories are the same— it’s a UI preference
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Not a superset. They’re distinct modes for different loops: Work is for research and multi-step deliverables like decks or sites, while Codex remains the agent for repo-level coding, terminal access, and diffs.
If you’re a dev, you’ll stay in Codex. Work is just a different toolset in the same app.
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@corbtt So sign into Facebook marketplace from the AI browser, don't give it access to your entire online life just to enable that one usecase
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@simonw I'd put money on this being resolved in the other direction (the browser you use and the browser your AI agents use will tend to converge).
It's too useful for my agent to be able to eg. manage a Facebook Marketplace listing for me. It needs my accounts.
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One of the most confusing aspects of GPT-5.6 is figuring out which model to use at which reasoning effort - sounds like Sol on Medium might be a good new default for coding work, if it's an upgrade from my previous favorite 5.5 xhigh
pash@pashmerepat
FYI: 5.6 Sol medium is better than 5.5 xhigh. As you go higher in reasoning levels on Sol, you will get insane levels of performance, but can burn through limits much more rapidly. We’re working on communicating this better!
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@wizplum @GergelyOrosz Anthropic downloaded pirated ebooks (which they claim they didn't use for training) and had to settle that for $1.5B - but the judge said it was OK that they bought and scanned 2nd hand physical books for their training runs simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/24/an…
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@simonw @GergelyOrosz They didn't just scrape the internet. Among other things, they bought archives of pirated books, and broke the TOS of multiple UGC platforms. The line between "it was in our observability" to "a derivative ended up in our datasets but don't worry there was no PII or IP" is thin.
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@simonw @wizplum @GergelyOrosz Because no tech giant has ever deliberately lied before even with a legally binding contract
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@wizplum @GergelyOrosz Scraping the public internet without permission from content authors is an entirely different issue from deliberately lying to your paying customers about legally binding contract provisions you have agreed with those customers
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@GergelyOrosz If you believe they are not storing any data after they stole the entire internet you're a fool. The only question is how obfuscation happens before it hits the training dataset.
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@rbenhassine1 @kellabyte How about saying someone is guilty of an "an outright fabrication" (which didn't hold up), or was "writing slop well before he had access to LLMs"?
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@kellabyte Saying someone is a bad manager isn't a personal criticism.
Saying a product or company is driven by corporate incentives rather than technical excellence isn't a personal criticism either.
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