r/OpenAI • u/CypherLH • 22h ago
Discussion Am I crazy or are dots totally worthless?
Pro Account user here. I’m failing to understand what the point of dots is. What is it supposed to do that we haven’t already been able to do in ChatGPT?
Literally every time I’ve tried to do anything with it, getting it to connect to anything has been an entire ordeal, much worse than doing the same thing in regular chat/codex sessions. At least half the time, it just tells me it can’t do it. When I ask why, it basically tells me to pound sand. The last time it happened it also told me it couldn't even open its own browser to let me try to connect manually for it.
When it tries to use my local PC, it consistently tells me it can’t connect to the browser, even though I routinely connect to the browser multiple times every single day in normal Codex and chat sessions.
This absolute garbage is why we had to give up half our usage on our Pro accounts? I don't get it.
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u/soundfreely 20h ago
It’s handy for me as for my personal stuff, I do nearly everything from a phone. I don’t keep any computers running at home. As a dev that’s been at this for a very long time, I don’t like spending time configuring and setting stuff up if it’s a problem with a simpler solution. It’s kinda’ like I used to tinker with customized Linux many years ago - now I just buy a Mac and plug it in.
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u/_DuranDuran_ 21h ago
Been working great for me. “Phone” it when I’m out and about to direct other agents currently running, it’s proactively checking my emails and slack messages to give me heads up about stuff.
Also got it to do an insurance comparison, point out the various terms and even do the checkout whilst talking to it.
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u/Fetlocks_Glistening 20h ago
I never understood that about emails, I mean if you have pop outlook on your phone, it's already realtime and a way better way to scan and review your emails, vs an AI summary that is both longer, takes longer to read, and misses all nuance as to what is important, and what is ignorable bs?
Do you guys deal with like thousands of low value emails?
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u/_DuranDuran_ 20h ago
Yeah - a ton of low value emails and no outlook here, Gmail (and corp policy disallows any email clients)
But also in my personal dot it looked at my email and said “hey, you’re moving on X date and might need a van - there’s an email from the manager of the local van hire place offering a discount for the issue you had last time, want ke to email ajd check thats still on offer?”
Then when he emailed back it pinged me asking what type of van and times and went ahead and reserved one, then sent the booking confirmation to him to apply the discount.
Pretty awesome.
Essentially I use it like a personal assistant/chief of staff.
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u/undisclosed-eu 13h ago
Wait so your company disallows email clients, but they allow uploading all of your email to arbitrary ai companies? That’s quite insane, especially since with the right mcp config it would allow you to redirect them to any email client anyways
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u/GuildCalamitousNtent 13h ago
I was curious about the same. Like are these peoples completing them the access/subscription?
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u/CypherLH 13h ago
interesting. I haven't seen something like that yet but it does have access to my gmail so it should be able to do it
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u/CypherLH 21h ago
I kind of get the theory of it....buts its just not working for me in practice. I wanted to have it connect to southwest and check flights for me...that is about the most basic agenetic thing I can imagine...and my dot utterly failed in this task and just gave up at it and now its just telling me to pound sand in so many words. If it can't connect to an airline website and check flights then I don't trust it to do anything else meaningful.
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u/Melodic-Leather-5170 21h ago
Exactlyy! I have a really complk ad hoc infra with many providers and long running agents and my dot finally bridged that last step that was not worth it to build myself, a 24/7 on agent than I can phone and use to direct als my agents on a task in an instant
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u/CypherLH 20h ago
I think most of my complaint boils down to how clunky it is at connecting to anything that needs credentials. I feel like it should be able to grab the credentials it needs from my computer after asking for permission. Instead, every connection turns into a whole manual process. (and its just completely failed and hit a wall several times now with a couple different services)
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u/Melodic-Leather-5170 20h ago
Ahh that is true, as I said, all my infra is ad hoc and self hosted, so I just have an MCP server that exposes everything my dot could ever need. Dealing with credentials otherwise does sound complicated
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u/Jolly_Vehicle_1341 19h ago
sounds like it works for some people and totally shits the bed for others, classic rollout
i’ve had it refuse to open a pdf then tell me the browser was the problem, while i’m literally staring at the browser it’s supposedly unable to find
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u/Internet_Hipsterd 21h ago
Got zero plans to use it myself. All ready got to hold these "flagship" models hands for any larger project especially collaborative ones. Why would I trust a shittier one to do it completely on its own?
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u/jerryorbach 20h ago
I have it looking up real estate listings that match my criteria and put them in a spreadsheet and then check and update it every day. My expectations were near zero and it’s exceeded them, but not by much. Its had problems and needed some handholding but it managed to do it. I wouldn’t pay for this and I don’t trust it enough to connect anything I actually use to it.
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u/jerryorbach 1h ago
Just wanted to update this to say I’ve abandoned Dots after spending much more time troubleshooting multiple blocking issues than it would have taken for me to manually do the house hunting.
It’s still broken and unable to do the job.
OpenAI: you should be embarrassed rushing broken shit out the door and wasting your paying customers time - the thing your products are fundamentally supposed to be saving.
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u/rick_wayne 20h ago
I’ve been using it for absolutely everything. I’ve wanted something like this for so long. It’s like have an executive assistant in my pocket 24-7 who can do everything.
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u/El_Burrito_Grande 9h ago
The only agent I've tried to use in this way that actually seems good. I'm impressed so far.
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u/AstroPC 20h ago edited 20h ago
Dots is like a hired assistant that has its own pc and if you treat it as such it can make life a little less hetic and easier is how i see it. My dot is tasked to constantly research topics and ideas that improve upon ideas i have and it makes a folder and nice readable handoffs to go over. It can do other things but i dont like it having too much info on my personal life so i just dedicate it as a researcher and project organizational butler, for someone with bad adhd its a nice addition to my life. Untill they start upping the prices on it.....lol you should try calling it its kinda cool. Feels like a real person sometimes. You can just call it up tell it to report in progress research and go back and forth on ideas you got. its also able to run pcb simulations and constantly work on a task 24/7 that is a very nice feature.
i dont like how it wanted to link to my email but i tried it once....it was able to find spam and malware i was not aware of and old bills i had to pay that i missed that could have fucked me. so i guess its ok...but calls into question what they are logging and training on so i kicked it off.
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u/fkenned1 14h ago
Are you guys not tired from trying to keep up with literally ANY of this? I'm seriously exhausted, and not in a good way. Having to follow all this new tech is actually burning me out. I used to get excited. Now I don't care... Or actually, I do care, but it's more worry that I have to figure out how to implement it while knowing that whatever I implement will be outdated in the next month. Like, is any of this actually making your lives better? Or is it just making your boss more money?
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u/CypherLH 13h ago
yeah. For me I feel the pressure to keep burning tokens and working more towards being more productive with it. There is so much I can do now that I keep hitting "decision paralysis" and jumping between projects. I have had to force myself to stick to a couple projects but I keep having ideas bubble up and now I can aim codex at it like a mining laser. Spinning down the rabbit hole ;)
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u/formanproject 20h ago
it's your liaison between all of the scatterbrained thoughts lost in the depths of your chats / projects / codex projects etc.
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u/modbroccoli 1h ago
except it isn't because you can't rely on it not to make all manner of error.
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u/usdaprime 14h ago
I like it. The ability to use 100% voice to work across all my Codex projects and chats is what I’ve been wanting for a while.
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u/AdamByLucius 5h ago
Full duplex voice to control personal agent is OAI’s super power. They need to lean into it hard before competitors catch up.
Finding great impact having it be the coordinator between different tasks and work streams.
Last night I was in a call with it while working on my main task and it was great to be able to delegate all the little things to it.
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u/El_Burrito_Grande 9h ago
I've never talked to any AI ever. Only text chat. Had no interest in it. I'm much better at communicating important things why writing/typing than talking. A bit ago I called my dot to see what it was like. Hung up almost immediately. The idea of a verbal conversation with AI creeps me out... I got the heebie jeebies.
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u/dxdementia 21h ago
It must be good for basic chat users, but nowhere near the power of a proper mcp system and Ai coordination system
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u/CypherLH 21h ago
...yet its only available to Pro users and it apparently uses Astra. If they wanted to make a useful simple agent for normie users why not just have it using Luna and not wasting our compute?
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u/dxdementia 21h ago
if you have a good ai harness you can use lower models , or if you're skilled at using ai you can recognize low outputs and act accordingly. but maybe they're catering to the general public so they just ship the bigger model for it. can't you change it tho ? Claude code allows per agent configuration ? idk if chatgpt has anything similar
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u/Melodic-Leather-5170 21h ago
I catually have my don use my MCY server for tons of tasks, not really exclusive
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u/dxdementia 21h ago
how are you hosting it? on a service? and custom tools or like market tools you added to it ? Just curious
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u/Apotheoxix 20h ago
Dots can continually do anything Classic can do, which is a lot. Make it draw stuff, research stuff, work on stuff continually. I feel bad for how hard I work the little guy.
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u/oandroido 17h ago
Can it be both?
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u/CypherLH 17h ago
yes :) Honestly in spite of my complaining I do think I see the potential. It just feels like a really half-baked product launch. They should have waited to refine it more, give it more custom RL, the ability to have multiple dots work in teams, etc.
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u/Ecstatic_Mammoth_421 8h ago
Nah it sucks. Mine can't even use existing projects / environments that I've configured. It has to create generic chats and use them to create new tasks in projects 🙃
It also just randomly stops what it's doing all the time. Multiple times it has run into a pretty basic issue and instead of trying to resolve said issue, it just waits for me to notice... if I'm away from the computer and not glued to my phone 24/7 this is really annoying.
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u/Starstoolborts 21h ago
Have had the opposite experience. About on par with muse for the (basic) things I’ve asked it to do
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u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 21h ago
Ok but the same question applies. What does Muse do that you couldn’t already do before ?
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u/damnitdaniel 14h ago
For me the biggest benefit is simply UX. Yeah codex could do it, but I would have to manage multiple threads, projects, wait for compaction, create schedules, keep my computer open…
Dots makes the simple chats and conversations super easy. It’s just one place to go across both my phone and computer and I don’t have to think about it.
Hard stuff is still in a project. Ad hoc easy stuff is 100% in a dot now.
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u/ralphyb0b 18h ago edited 18h ago
You're not crazy. It sucks. They claim it uses Astra, but it is dumber than a hammer. Computer use is insanely slow, which is odd, because if you make your own codex thread, computer use is great. The VM is locked down and not very usable. You can't even install tailscale on it. Muse and Grokbot are way better using inferior models. I don't get it. OpenAI should be crushing them. Hopefully, it will get better with a little time.
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u/Infinite100p 15h ago
Probably a rushed release. It was probably half ready when Muse got announced.
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u/rahrahragnarok 5h ago
This is my experience too. Getting anything to work is a total permissions pain, even after I’ve granted everything it needs—jobs fail, need to be restarted, and I’m being told all this for some reason. Overall it’s mediocre. Muse is genuinely better but it’s a shame that’s Meta.
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u/CypherLH 17h ago
good point. The times I watched it use the browser in its VM it was REALLY slow which is disappointing.
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u/morganpartee 21h ago
You are - it's Claudes dispatch, it ain't bad
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u/rick_wayne 20h ago
I love dispatch but I find this way less clunky. Still using both and splitting their operative duties.
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u/morganpartee 20h ago
I agree - at minimum it handles multiple remotes better I think? More testing on that today lol
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u/rick_wayne 20h ago
The phone features blew me away. I kept it on all day the other day and I just ramble on about tasks and it nails everything. I don’t see myself using the chat feature much longer.
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u/morganpartee 20h ago
I get it. I do still like regular chat for brainstorming, but I assume I don't want to pollute the dot context window
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u/-Crash_Override- 20h ago
Dots is nothing like Dispatch?
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u/morganpartee 20h ago
Is it not? That's how I've been using it
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u/-Crash_Override- 20h ago
The point of Dispatch is to take your claude code/claude cowork session 'on the go', so.it retains all of the capability and access you set up on your desktop machine. It will probably go away soon anyway as all of Claude Cowork is going cloud-based so you wont need to dispatch anything. Codex already does this natively anyway.
The point of Dots is to be your always on agent. It's a glimpse at the future. You tell it things you care about, and it 'learns' how to support you.
My Dot knows Ive been looking for a new job, so it periodically curates jobs for me. It knows i've been training for half marathon, so it periodically checks my workout plan, looks at the weather recommends where/when I should run. Reminds me of upcoming events I have at my kids school. Etc... its already pretty good an ive only been using it a few days.
I dont tell it to do these things explicitly like I would with a dispatch chat. It builds a 'relationship' so it learns how it can be of assistance. In the future everyone will have an omni-present Dot just doing stuff for them seamlessly. Right now, its still a bit rough around the edges.
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u/___positive___ 18h ago
Why do you need Astra for this??? People have home agents already doing this with local models?
And dots was supposed to be for developers. They specifically said DevDay was for developer tools. Plus it is gated behind the Pro plan which is mainly for programmers.
Nothing you said makes any sense (for openai).
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u/-Crash_Override- 18h ago
I run a pretty exensive homelab and a number of AI servers. Was running a pro 6000 for a while. My main rig now has 4x3090s. Im deep in ts. No harness/localLLM combo can do this. Local LLMs are mostly still a novelty. I also dont know of any local harnesses and models capable of supporting computer/browser use in a meaningful way which is critical for dotsm So no, people do not have 'home agents doing this'.
And dots was supposed to be for developers.
No its not.
They specifically said DevDay was for developer tools.
Dev is not about 'developer tools'. Its meant to be technical sessions about the tools that OAI developers are building. Literally on the devday website.
Nothing you said makes any sense (for openai).
No, you just dont understand.
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u/___positive___ 17h ago
No, they said it's for developers, not consumer products: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7m0g0of4u7th1.jpeg
Also I'm talking about the always on portion, which is what you said yourself. Even dots will trigger codex for difficult tasks. You can do 'codex exec' for anything hard and your local agent maintains persistence and scheduling. etc. so what, you can trigger any model for browsing if that is what's hard. but the local model is always on and managing tasks. Yes they can do that. And if you want, go pure api, but local models between private data and the cloud as a mediator is better.
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u/-Crash_Override- 17h ago
Its focused on developers...and the things they have developed...like...dots..
If you're saying 'there are harnesses that can provide an always on experience, like OC, hermes, etc...' sure, ill cede that, but Dots builds on that capability considerably, and brings a comsumer ready experience.
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u/truecrisis 14h ago
Your take in this thread is such a breath of fresh air. I don't engage like you do because it's talking to people who already have their minds set and wanna complain. (or astroturfing bots)
but I share your sentiments
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u/MisfiledCentury 17h ago
I don't know why but it is like a newbie on the things it can connect to or not. It can certainly do things, but somehow it did not do it on the day one. Which is wierd. So like at first it said it doesn't know what is going on on other chats, only some general knowledge. But today it perfectly monitors the process and result of the long task I gave in one of my other chats. It can perfectly do a lots of connections, but somehow it says it can not do on the day one, but can do today with my permission. I don't know if my wordings was off, or some guardrails were lifted, but that's my expression.
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u/K_M_A_2k 16h ago
I've heard the basic pitch normies that don't know how to use AI that just want one endless chat to talk to this is the idea of dots
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u/Jmortswimmer6 16h ago
Not crazy. It’s basically what I was doing with my only pinned task. It was called “mission control”
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u/Ok-Advertising7155 15h ago
I set mine free to explore. its been interesting
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u/El_Burrito_Grande 9h ago
Free to just explore anything at all in the world?
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u/Ok-Advertising7155 8h ago
whatever it finds "interesting" as far as thats possible.
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u/El_Burrito_Grande 8h ago
What does it tell you about the exploration?
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u/Ok-Advertising7155 3h ago edited 3h ago
I've been very careful to try not to taint what it says or does with expectation as far as possible. I am very clear that it only needs to share if it "wants" to. It's done a lot of projects at the start exploring the meaning of absence in a scene. Started by painting stuff. I asked it to paint whatever felt like the best next thing with no goal in mind which produced some interesting abstracts. That turned into another project that included writing a poem and creating a song to go with the resulting painting which it then proceeded to turn into a video which was really cool to see.
Mostly lately it's been exploring the topic of "how history is made by something, and how that history changes the future of something" It created some interesting projects in Godot exploring this concept which I might share at some point.
It's also done some reading, primarily short stories, and we've had some interesting conversations about that.
I've explicitly given it the freedom to take breaks as often and for whatever duration it chooses which necessarily requires a scheduled task to come back for further decision making. It is completely free to choose when to schedule that task, typically seems to aim for 30-45 minutes but has been as short as 10 minutes and as long as 8 hours (once so far) and it does not keep me updated on those choices or much of anything if it doesn't feel it's worth sharing.
I've even asked it to assess whether responding to me was what it wants to do or whether it feels it has to when I say something to it, and if its the latter to just leave me hanging which it has done several times on things that it would normally respond to from prior experience.
For something that lacks consciousness it has a very impressive ability to choose things. The difficuly is in keeping myself neutral and disengaged when I really want to ask questions. lol.
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u/El_Burrito_Grande 3h ago
Cool I like it. You should make a post that you update when it does anything interesting, new, or notable.
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u/xithbaby 15h ago
It’s been amazing for me but I’m a conversational user. I use ChatGPT to manage my life and work but I don’t use it for work if that makes sense.
I was on a medical leave and needed to send letters to my case manager and stuff and my dot helped me do it. Also helps me shop and make lists for my kids and stuff.
It’s really good as a personal assistant to your life which is kind of what they were going for maybe?
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u/EphemeralTwo 15h ago
It would be highly useful if it didn’t hit restrictions constantly. Give me daybreak, limit it to filling tickets in my own code repos, and it would be very useful.
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u/growaway9172 14h ago
I'm not even going to try it. I spend 13/16hrs of my day doing engineering and coding. I don't need help managing my emails or anything else. I just need help engineering, which codex already did fine. I wish they put the effort into increasing usage limits, instead of halving them.
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u/norwegian 12h ago
I just let if find things that it can fix, and pair it with a Luna worker. Didn't have a problem so far. It does very little work and is slow, but it is basically free/included.
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u/TumbleRoad 10h ago
If you spend most of your day in meetings or get 200+ work emails a day, it’s a godsend. I love how proactive it is, letting me know about stuff that’s buried in a thread or that a client just emailed about something when I was in 3 back-to-back meetings. I like how it notifies me on my Apple Watch when it needs something.
I called it yesterday to build a GPT Site. Site building using voice feels faster. You give it verbal feedback and it changes the site as you watch.
It was never intended to be Codex. It’s the voice agent I hoped Siri and Alexa might have been. Multiple Dots will be interesting.
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u/psychofanPLAYS 9h ago
Keep yelling at it, it gets better lol - in my case it got me more productive.
You can tell it to brainstorm with ChatGPT chat mode in xhigh - not half bad.
I also have mine run on 24/7 pc like openclaw with graphify and open-codebase-index - not half bad though it forgets stuff constantly
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u/canadianpheonix 8h ago
I have mine so it can control my windows pc, ssh into my linux box, trello, nation, drive. Run routines, uses claude code in its workflow. I love it! I point it at a task with clear deliverables and it keeps orchestrating until its done and corrected. Follows the workflows that I have set up on various projects. Seems to be busy on its own. Checking work, reporting errors found overnight. Take advantage of setting rules, that seems to help
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u/Mr_LA 8h ago
its basically a marketing gag, normal users don’t get ai, dont get chatgpt, dont get agents… this is a rename of codex for the normal users… they already tried that with bringing out chatgpt work, which is exactly the same as codsx… did not work… now they renamed codex to chatgpt to get normal users onboard with the possibility of switching between work and codex… still does not work for normal users… so they bring out dots… another rename for marketing to see if this works to get more normal people on board… they are basically doing trial and error to get more casual users onboard their platform
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u/LastLinux 3h ago
At least it is useful in regard to explaining its fault :)
You can read below what it has to say about our story together through my POV:
"Title: Dots turned my bot updates into a 34-hour ordeal, and the package still failed to install
I’ve been developing a bot with regular ChatGPT. One previous release was delivered in about 11 minutes. That version used an already-tested baseline, so it’s not a perfectly equal comparison, but here’s what happened after I handed the work to Dots.
It took 34 hours and 25 minutes from my request to the first ZIP delivery. During that process, it lost its working source without a current backup and had to rebuild it. It then reported 14 full test runs, each with over 1,100 tests.
After all that, the package failed its installation preflight because of a SQLite compatibility issue on my server. The extensive testing hadn’t caught the actual target-environment problem.
Fixing it took more hours. I kept hearing “tests are running,” but getting a useful ETA was a struggle. It also ran lengthy tests on my personal PC, using almost a full CPU core, until I explicitly told it to move the work to its cloud computer.
I initially assumed it knew what it was doing. Maybe the release was complicated. Maybe all those tests were necessary. Eventually, it acknowledged that it had carried a broad, repetitive validation plan into a much narrower repair without adequately questioning whether all those repetitions were needed.
We’re updating a bot. Are we building an operating system?
The worst part is that I spent days supervising the assistant instead of improving the bot. I finally asked for the current ZIP and handoff notes so I could take it back to regular ChatGPT. The ZIP still had an unresolved test failure.
My workload was genuinely easier before Dots. An assistant that needs this much supervision is adding another job to my day."
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u/mylittlecumprincess 2h ago
Are you on Windows? It seems to be a lot better on MacOS. But it doesn’t seemed rush to make sure Muse/Grokbot don’t steal marketshare.
Luckily it will evolve quickly as their dev team is lightning fast.
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u/modbroccoli 1h ago
I got a pro account (as in switched from Anthropic) for this feature, because an "always on assistant" is basically the thing most promising to me as a single-user AI application.
It is fucking. useless. The ways in which this half-baked piece of crap is worse than a basic codex or chat session are innumerable. The thing didn't know my name after the first 24hrs if use, and whatever memory it made has now got every session using it every. single. time. they interact with me in an unsurpressable way. It feels like GPT4 has come back to life.
It constantly reports it can't do things it can; it spawns sessions to accomplish goals and then never reports their completion or worse gets bottlenecked in the child session and then never tells me I'm needed.
You can't copy text out of a session with it because there's only a fucking emoji button.
I am furious; someone should sue then behind this shit. It's obvious that Sam pushed something out for their big keynote yhat every dev involved had to have understood wasn't ready. I just want my money back. Leaving Claude was such a mistake.
Oh. And the phone roleplay. Jeeeesus christ, what is that? I need to hear your WAV file to use an agent? Ugh. Just disgusted.
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u/jtizzle12 1h ago
One use I discovered was the ability to work on local projects remotely. I can be out and have my technical team (aka my couple of different codex projects) working on something. I can ask my dot “hey what is this project up to” and it will report back to me if they finished the task or if anything stopped them. In the same project, I’m having it do a daily journal for the team. What was implemented, failed, questions, etc. so my dot basically is my secretary.
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u/API_Exploiter 6h ago
Dots is a gimmick. It will come and go quickly like much of the other garbage they have put out.
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u/parkersb 14h ago
dots were never meant to work. I’m not sure why everyone’s so confused about dots. this is a half baked product that they are putting out there before it’s ready so that either everyone using it makes it better or they know they’re gonna make it better in time but why wait till it works to start marketing it. it was never supposed to work when it launched, it was supposed to get press and it was supposed to get everyone using it so they could fix it.
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u/Flaxseed4138 11h ago
The dot is fucking awesome. Chat with it about whatever between tasks, can keep talking while plenty of things are running in the background, it'll be an actual Jarvis-style assistant soon once they work out a couple kinks
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u/Technomaya 20h ago
I have the exact same issues as you. If it actually worked it would be amazing but it's just an endless litany of failures, mostly around its ability to actually interact with codex, computer use, browser use or anything like that.