MechanismArticle
Giving AI access to your computer is the most powerful way to use it, but the naming conventions for the agentic modes across ChatGPT (Work, Codex) and Claude (Cowork, Code) are confusingly inconsistent and do not map onto each other.
The article explains that the most powerful AI use is computer access via agentic modes, but notes that ChatGPT's Work and Codex and Claude's Cowork and Code have names that don't map between products and share names with less capable modes. ✦ AI generated
Author · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-27 · original ↗
The most powerful way to use AI is to give it access to your computer. You do that by downloading the ChatGPT or Claude apps and picking a mode to use. ChatGPT's two agent modes are Work and Codex; Claude's are Cowork and Code. The names do not map onto each other in any way that will help you remember them. And yes, these use the same names as the Work and Cowork modes we discussed above, but operate differently, and have more features and capabilities because they can access your computer.
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In practice · 2
The difference between ChatGPT Work on mobile versus on desktop is spectacularly unintuitive — on mobile, switching from Chat to Work mode gives the Code Interpreter unrestricted internet access, while on desktop the same mode is effectively a skin on top of Codex.Author · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 90%Claude's edit tool is built around search-and-replace, whereas OpenAI's Codex uses an apply_patch mechanism instead, and OpenAI has publicly discussed training its models specifically to use that apply_patch tool well.Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 70%