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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

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.

deleted 17d ago
[deleted]
ghilston 17d ago
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
- nullmatrix 17d ago
  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.
  - trenchgun 16d ago
    You do not even need a subscription. Even ChatGPT free account has some quota for Codex/Work use.
    - nullmatrix 15d ago
      I wasn't aware of that. I am aware that Google connectors are gated behind the $20 ChatGPT sub.
    - simonw 16d ago
      I just signed into https://chatgpt.com 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?
      - gessha 14d ago
        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.
      - ValentineC 16d ago
        Random but I have no idea how this comment of yours ended up dead. I ended up vouching for it.
merpkz 17d ago
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
- mike_hearn 17d ago
  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.
  - ceejayoz 16d ago
    An agent with full access to your codebase is able to email out without supervision in response to an untrusted messsage?
    - embedding-shape 16d ago
      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:
      - dormento 16d ago
        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.
      - KronisLV 16d ago
        > 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.
matsemann 17d ago
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.
- latexr 17d ago
  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.
  - mschuster91 17d ago
    > 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.
jstummbillig 17d ago
"Going into that two-way voice mode" How does that work in codex? I know the dictate function, can't find anything else.
nozzlegear 16d ago
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.
- afro88 16d ago
  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
  - nozzlegear 15d ago
    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.
- joquarky 16d ago
  > 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?
stronglikedan 16d ago
If it hasn't accidentally sent one of your drafts yet, then I can see how you're comfortable with that.
shostack 16d ago
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.

deleted 17d ago

[deleted]

ghilston 17d ago

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

nullmatrix 17d ago
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.
- trenchgun 16d ago
  You do not even need a subscription. Even ChatGPT free account has some quota for Codex/Work use.
  - nullmatrix 15d ago
    I wasn't aware of that. I am aware that Google connectors are gated behind the $20 ChatGPT sub.
  - simonw 16d ago
    I just signed into https://chatgpt.com 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?
    - gessha 14d ago
      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.
    - ValentineC 16d ago
      Random but I have no idea how this comment of yours ended up dead. I ended up vouching for it.

merpkz 17d ago

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

mike_hearn 17d ago
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.
- ceejayoz 16d ago
  An agent with full access to your codebase is able to email out without supervision in response to an untrusted messsage?
  - embedding-shape 16d ago
    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:
    - dormento 16d ago
      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.
    - KronisLV 16d ago
      > 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.

matsemann 17d ago

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.

latexr 17d ago
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.
- mschuster91 17d ago
  > 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.

jstummbillig 17d ago

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

nozzlegear 16d ago

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.

afro88 16d ago
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
- nozzlegear 15d ago
  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.
joquarky 16d ago
> 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?

stronglikedan 16d ago

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

shostack 16d ago

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.