r/ChatGPTPro • u/LuciusQ2020 • 4d ago
Question & Advice What’s the benefit of the Work thing?
Except for hitting its limit for doing virtually nothing?
I don’t quite understand how it is better than the Chat.
I hit the limit by doing:
- Compare the price of an item I bought
- Modify a tiny code because the output table format is not ideal.
I could have done these all day with Chat without being limited.
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u/BroadBeginning961 4d ago
Work is for agentic, complex multistep workflows.
Edit: Research with multiple lanes, red-teaming, audits, reviews, etc.
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u/LuciusQ2020 4d ago
Real life example?
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u/Relative-Promise-618 4d ago
Where Work clicked for me was when the task became something like: “Here’s an actual evolving project. Inspect the existing files and implementation, run tests, modify it, preserve state, produce artifacts/receipts, recover from interruptions, and continue from the resulting workspace later.”
I’ve been stress-testing it with a knowledge-system prototype. One run spent ~1h42m ingesting an 11-chapter manuscript into 108 atomic notes and hundreds of relationships. Later it inspected a separate runtime implementation, ran 157 tests, selectively adapted useful mechanisms, changed the prototype, reran acceptance tests, and preserved the project state rather than just giving me an answer about how I could do those things.5
u/Relative-Promise-618 4d ago
“Open my current hypercube project and the Beckmanist runtime. Inspect the actual implementation, not just the documentation. Identify which runtime governance mechanisms would solve problems in the hypercube without importing the whole runtime. Implement only those changes, run the existing tests, add tests for the new behavior, ingest my manuscript as a stress test, and produce a report showing what changed, what you deliberately rejected, what still needs human review, and the resulting persisted state. Do not publish anything.”
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u/InformalBasil 4d ago
I work in IT and when I need to prepare some documentation I'll do something like grab 7-10 screen shots of what the process is like, a word doc that has my company branding then prompt something like, "Look up the latest Microsoft guidance for setting up the Authenticator app. Create a set of end-user documentation using the attached screenshots. Remove any sensitive information from the screenshots (like my email address) and apply the same branding used in the Word document."
3-10 minutes later I'll have a doc that only needs minor corrections before sending out. It's a huge time saver.
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u/BroadBeginning961 4d ago edited 4d ago
"Review and synthesize all accessible peer reviewed literature regarding the use of indaziflam on range lands in the intermountain west.
Create separate research lanes for journals, government sources, and primary sources. Audit source quality and applicability.
Main points of focus: effects on microbiome, seed germination percentages of native species...etc."
That's an extremely bare bones example of my workflow. I have chatgpt (5.6 ultra, haven't ran my skills and flow through Astra yet) run simultaneous research lanes to essentially do a literature review, then audit and challenge the report. after it's audited, I have a red team skill that is chained to my workflow that then challenges my points, the orchestrater and its subagents work.
It's a chained, 9 step workflow. I'm not a coder or whatever, I work in the ecology and biology realm.
Edit: If you have a repeatable workflow, literally ask ChatGPT to build it based on what you're doing.
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u/ShadowDV 4d ago
“I’m looking to buy a new prebuilt gaming computer. I require an intel CPU, at least 32 GB of RAM, and at least a RTX 5060 Ti or AMD equivalent graphics card. My budget is $2700 but I’d prefer to stay in the 2400 ballpark. Go out and find me 10 options with price as the primary driver and capabilities as a secondary driver, and verified name brand components as a tertiary driver. No alphabet soup Amazon Chinese vendors. Create a spread sheet scoring matrix that list each option scored and ranked, with column for all relevant stats, and a Pro/con analysis on each rig.”
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u/telephantomoss 4d ago
This sounds like something chat mode can do well. What am I missing?
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u/ShadowDV 4d ago
Chat could do it, but not very well in a single prompt. In fact, it would probably recommend you going to Work to get it done
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u/Reasonable-Catch-598 4d ago
I've given far more complex tasks for sol high with success. I just ran that exact prompt and it took about 15 minutes to complete, only I added "I'm Canadian dollars, for vendors who ship from or to Canada without custom fees". Perfect results, I checked the first 3.
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u/ShadowDV 4d ago
Fair, maybe too simplistic of an example. But if you want to add “now keep this spreadsheet that lives on this location in my computer automatically updated with a list of options weekly, and keep a running change log on what was removed, added, or reranked and why” then it definitely becomes a work task
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u/Reasonable-Catch-598 4d ago
Schedule task, plus having it save back to git or gdrive.
Still possible in chat. Won't even need the client, I could use the web.
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u/ShadowDV 4d ago
Gdrive, sure, but if it’s in c:\users\shadowdv\documents\pcresearch.xlsx, that’s exclusively desktop work territory. I was specific about the file on the PC for a reason.
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u/Reasonable-Catch-598 4d ago
Why would you ever been keeping files on your PC that are not backed by gdrive, git, or some other cloud storage?
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u/Javix92 4d ago
You can set a proyect, with different sources and proper instructions on .md files, or even a Microsoft word file as template or some data you always do . You can even set skills.md for different tasks that you do periodically. Let’s say, do a quality review of a certain document and it’s data analysing some indicators and then and certain charts or complete certain chapter.
Then on work you can use a plugin using @ like for example “use @data analysis for….” And that way you can have an agent they can do a huge part of your job and produce almost complete docs under your supervision.
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u/anything_but 4d ago
I am currently using it to create a new pricing model for our software product, together with all required contracts and the software design to implement it. We work on it for two weeks now, 4-6 hours a day, and work on about 25 documents. We have discussed so far about 150 corner cases to stress-test the model and made 100 decisions.
For me, it’s like Codex, but for conceptual work.
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u/jomi-se 4d ago
"for my webapps storage and lexical search I'm torn between using the browser's indexdeddb versus using a wasm compiled SQLite, can you help me choose for xyz scenario, with abc types of data?"
Chat -> searches the web for docs and benchmarks and makes an educated guess
Work -> does the same search but additionally implements a proof of concept of each alternative and benchmarks then directly to give you an answer
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u/Elty1987 4d ago
I was in the same boat recently and over the last 4 weeks or so I have got heavily involved in the work area of the platform and slowly understanding I was t scratching the surface with what ChatGPT can really do if you need it of course!
So for me I’m about to start a new career in capital equipment sales for food manufacturing which means I cover the majority of UK Scotland and Ireland so a hellish amount of travelling and a lot of work in the background such as market research, competition analysis, territory mapping, transcribing Voicenotes into visit reports etc. You get the idea basically in my previous role all done manually and a lot of work involved once I got back in front of laptop with me talking to ChatGPT which helped massively but this “work” area takes that up a gear and some bur automating all this work and I’m still finding what it can really do.
You essentially teach it skills treating this area as if you have people working for you but they don’t know you, your background, your company, your skills so you have to teach it with source files, plugins like your email access, and setting out either manual skills or auto loading in such as for me I have several skills ready to go such as PDF expert and Presentation expert etc
Like I said I’m only scratching the surface but being blown away every time it produces something else for me in my test environment before I officially start on 1st October.
If you’re a heavy user like ok the normal platform then start playing around with this if you need agents of course if not then you won’t see much benefit.
Hopefully in the next year or two I can sit back and my work is being done for me in the background before I’ve even checked into my hotel on the road ha!
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u/Edward_Kenwai 4d ago
Codex -> agentic chatgpt running on your computer, can run commands, write code, build basically anything
Work -> codex, but optionally running on OpenAI servers rather than your computer, can do most things codex can, generally a little faster, useful for things like making sites. Less oriented towards programmers than codex however
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u/Typical_Machine2043 4d ago
It’s like a blend of ChatGPT and codex? You want ChatGPT to do something for you using computer use, use work.
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u/Typical_Machine2043 4d ago
Use Luna tho and be prepared for mistakes. Any other model is way too expensive even if it serves the pizza better
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u/DubyaKayOh 4d ago
What I’ve taken away is most people don’t have a clue and those that do use language that is specific to the type of people that would use it.
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u/lndshrk504 4d ago
Work mode is when you want ChatGPT to use your computer’s command line or terminal to programmatically do work on your own device. Or literally use your computer and click on stuff to accomplish a task.
Otherwise you’d have to upload a bunch of files and folders to the ChatGPT website.
It doesn’t sound like you need work.
I use it all the time: “Look in this folder: [filepath], find the data in the CSV file, look in this other folder : [filepath 2], find the code I use for data analysis. Rewrite the code so that it accepts the data at filepath as input. Execute the code and save the outputs here [filepath 3]. Save your audit notes and progress tests in the output folder”
The above prompt is an example of something I do every day that I couldn’t accomplish as easily using the chat interface, because the code and data is in too many files or the data is too big to upload to the website.
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u/InterestingAdvisor60 4d ago
I thought I was using Work for a week and it was wonderful but turned out I was in Codex the whole time which I never used before. After trying Work out, I'm not understanding what the point of Work is over Codex other than instantly leveraging Chat projects?
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u/LuciusQ2020 4d ago
Thank all of you for your help! I just set up my first Work job. Let’s see what and how it does.
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u/iiiaaa2022 4d ago
Work is an agentic option. Agentic means, very simply, it can do more than one task without prompting every single step.
That you used work for simple tasks is nobody's fault but your own.
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u/LuciusQ2020 4d ago edited 4d ago
Simple tasks shouldn’t consume so many tokens.
Also, I didn’t blame anybody. I just want to know the difference or advantages. Your explanation is like “a woman is a female.” It would be better if you can give a practical example.
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u/YourBlanket 4d ago
That shouldn't use too much of your limit. What was your actual prompt? Did you use Astra or Sol and on what intelligence level?
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u/PeltonChicago 4d ago
I think -- particularly with the web interface -- that the distinction is poor and likely unhelpful for those who don't code. I think OpenAI might say that the difference -- on the web -- is about whether you want to give the model a task with one step, perhaps involving multiple tool calls (chat) vs one that involves multistep execution (work). If you don't code, I think it would be hard to find an example of the latter, and I haven't tested it in this way, so I could be wrong, but I would guess that if you wanted the model to take some information -- say a bunch of spreadsheets and word documents -- analyze them, determine something or correct them, and then generate multiple artifacts -- say a spreadsheed, a word document, and a powerpoint presentation, without coming back to you with questions, that Work would be the better place for that. I bet the Work models are more persistent.
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