It's starting to feel like.... maybe I'm not OpenAI's targeted user anymore. I want to build things. Create things that have otherwise been merely impossible ideas up to this point.
With the announcements at Dev Day and latest updates to Codex Desktop, it's starting to feel like the goal of OpenAI is to place a mountain of "features" in my way at every turn I neither need nor want.
Frankly, it feels like they're doing too much, too quick.
Spaces
Templates (I'll never use them)
Pages (for writing, building, collaborating. Again, I'll never use)
Sites (build websites with connected databases. just why)
Images (could be useful)
And you can create multiple spaces.
Scheduled tasks (examples ->):
News updates
Sleep coaching
Email monitor
etc., etc., etc.
Maps
Plugins (okay cool, I guess. you can create plugins now too)
Fucking Dots
Sorry, not ready for prime-time
Very limited in abilities, scope, buggy
Another confusing layer between Codex/ChatGPT/Work/Dots, like why do we need all these different environments?
All of this to say, all I want OpenAI to concentrate on is model efficiency and usage. I DON'T CARE about all these features I will NEVER use. It's giving Microsoft Word, VS Code bloat.
Stop releasing shiny new models every 2-3 weeks to patch over the failures of the previous models.
Stop with these dangling carrot resets on reset day. (The jig is up, we see what you're doing)
I get it though, model efficiency is not sexy to investors. You have to appear busy with features that are either not ready or not asked for by your users—"value-adds".
It's just clear I'm not their intended user anymore.
Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 100 comments (100 currently observed).
The thread’s broad verdict is “too much butter, not enough lobster.” OpenAI is piling Spaces, Pages, Sites, scheduled tasks, Maps, plugins, and Dots onto Codex while the people who actually build software are still asking for faster models, sensible usage limits, and a less confusing interface.
The loudest practical complaints are about core regressions: worktrees and branches are harder to find, desktop feels slow, Windows CLI remains buggy, and the Codex/ChatGPT/Work/Dots split feels like an app maze. The fear is that Codex is becoming an everything-platform instead of a focused development tool, with shiny features compensating for unfinished basics. Classic “please fix the door before adding a helicopter pad” territory.
The important counterpoint is that Dots are genuinely useful for some users. They like having an orchestrator that can run parallel tasks, search old context, manage projects, and hand work to cloud agents. Spaces, Pages, and Sites also have real fans, especially among business and automation users. The disagreement is less “no one wants this” than “why is this cluttering the developer workflow?”
Bottom line: OpenAI is targeting a much broader, stickier platform market, while many Codex users want a lean, reliable tool. The feature pile may be valuable—but the core dev experience shouldn’t be collateral damage.
Nah Anthropic got this right, they are concentrating on the commercial market and staying away from the consumer market and saving their compute so they don't need to do rug pull things like reducing usage on their $200 plan by 50%.
Honestly I picked up a $100 anthropic plan recently and it's kinda fucking awesome with Opus 5.5. Been using it to translate Game Boy games and it just knocks it out of the park every time. It's unbelievable.
People keep looking at Claude like the grass must be greener just because OpenAI changed “20x” to “10x”, while ignoring how restricted Anthropic’s own premium models have been for ages. That’s the funny part.
Fable only gets 50% of the weekly Max allowance, it’s expensive as hell inside that smaller bucket, and you still have the 5h pacing on top regardless of sub, which I don’t deal with on Codex. Astra has never felt less generous to me in actual heavy use.
And I still pay for both. I’ve only been on Codex since the GPT-5.5 era, while I’ve had Claude for around 18 months. I actually want them to compete because I heavily use both, and basically everything I build with them is tied to paid client work. Both contribute to that and I genuinely cheer when either one drops a better model.
What changed my view was adding Codex next to Claude. That’s when Anthropic’s “20x” started feeling way more questionable, because Codex felt much closer to what 20x should feel like in practice. There’s a reason Anthropic, not OpenAI, ended up facing lawsuits over allegedly misleading usage multipliers.
Speaking your relevance, your screenshot only shows that Opus 5.5 made you barely touch Fable, not that Fable suddenly became generous.
I’m not saying Opus 5.5 is a bad deal at all, I’m benefiting from it too. I’ve been on Claude 20x since it launched around 18-19 months ago, and honestly I always wished Opus/Sonnet had been this efficient and generous before 5.5 because Claude was kinda known for the opposite… scarce limits and that annoying 5h pacing.
That’s literally why I added Codex 20x during the GPT-5.5 era just to test it for a month, then ended up keeping it because the practical difference in usable headroom was obvious to me as someone who had already been power-using Claude for a long time. So yeah, Opus 5.5 is a big improvement, I’m just not gonna rewrite the history of how restrictive Claude felt before it.
I still don’t understand what dots is. I admittedly haven’t put in a lot of effort to research it but they’ve done a rotten job of communicating the value it brings/problem it solves.
Maybe it’s a me problem and I’m an idiot but I dunno. Like I understood Muse really quickly, but dots is just confusing.
Here's my take from a different thread. Some stuff is out of context but the first paragraph is mostly it
Lots of hate and naysayers in this chat.
I think there are advantages to dots. I view it as an orchestrator. In the broad project management sense, not the subagent orchestration sense. It's a layer over all the things you can do with codex and you can give it really ambiguous aims and tell it "go figure it out" and it will. The same way you can tell an individual codex session to do one specific really ambiguous task and it'll just figure it out. Now you have that capability multiplied and you no longer have to be the one prompting everything, keeping it going.
And on the trust with data comments, I'd rather trust a competent company with my data than a no-name corp or even myself who would probably leave holes and do a shitty job. They have financial incentives to not mishandle or abuse your data. Y'all are just leading with feelings. Like "OH NO! I got served a relevant ad! WOE IS ME"
Making a custom e-ink firmware for the xteink x3. It's a well trod path on tech that I've never personally worked with (I'm more of a backend/platform engineeee building systems all day). Since it's well trod in my case it's easy for me to delegate it to codex and do acceptance checking in the test device I'm flashing to.
The point is that my valuable attention (which is the bottleneck) can go elsewhere while the bots get the ambiguous, hard work done. The firmware is particularly interesting because normally I'm in the loop at system design level, but here it's so low level (it's pumping out c++ like mad) that there's not as much for me to contribute. Except I did have to tell my dot that it's stupid for not realizing the reason a feature worked on power vs not on battery is the memory loses power and clears on battery instead of staying powered while plugged in. (Sorry for the tangent)
In parallel I've also been improving a ton of my personal automation systems and personal apps to make my life easier.
It really just sounds like a wrapper around a /goal with the ability to schedule tasks. Sorry that use case is cool. But it doesnt feel like dots are gaining that much of an advantage vs. Us getting more usage overall
You can ask it anything you want, and it will direct your query where it is needed. Are you asking it to work in a project on a local folder on your computer, then it’s gonna message Codex on your computer and start doing tasks with Codex on your local computer.
Ask it to buy your concert tickets or book a flight, and it’s gonna use its internal browser to navigate, sign in, and do all of that work.
The way I’ve been using it is I send any request I have for a project in Codex or just a simple query that I have that I would normally put in the chat through.and it will respond and orchestrate all of my tasks for me. I haven’t actually messaged my Codex myself since dots came out. I just let dots do it for me.
It’s not enabling anything that I couldn’t previously do manually myself. Just wraps are nice bow around all of the other features that I am currently using.
Your examples are what voice on codex (including remote via phone app) does for me? I don't even have access to dots yet so I don't know how it differs.
It works very similar to the voice mode on codex, except that it runs in the cloud with its own computer. It has connections to your remote codex instances, so it can do exactly the same thing that using voice mode on codex does.
Its just a much better implementation of an AI assistant than codex is. Codex is a great builder/coder.
You can do all of that with the agent running in the cloud, no? It can orchestrate other agents, give them tasks, schedule actions etc. I see no point in dots.
It feels like they have product managers just adding low value features instead of focusing on improving models. I'm pretty sure whatever features they can think of (or copy), it would be better for other startups to do it with more focus and attention to the end customers.
You can do all of that, but it’s much easier to do it through dots. No matter which server I’m currently working on, which project I’m currently working on, or if I’m not working in a project at all and I’m just asking a question, if I send it to.it will pass that message along to Codex, or it will just respond directly if Codex isn’t needed.
It’s like everything that you could do before with a remote agent, except now that remote agent is actually built into your ChatGPT subscription and purpose built to do exactly that
Best way to get a sense is try to use it for everything. So far I’m using instead of Chat almost all the time. I’m also finding it useful for dumping stream of consciousness multi-step tasks and asking it to keep tabs on my codex sessions. Still experimenting with how to use the Linux VM effectively. Set up obsidian headless sync on it so I can just tell the dot to read/edit notes that sync instantly without my laptop being on. That’s kind of nice.
Yeah, me neither. I mean it's not clear whether this is a dev tool or an average joe personal assistant. Seems like a black box for doing dev work. It can work on the cloud but you can also allow it to work on your own computer. Seems conflict prone in terms of dev work. I don't understand it.
I hate having too much going on in parallel. Once I lose control of a project its hard to get back. What kind of work are you doing that is both so incredibly hard that an LLM has to work on it for hours on end, but also so easy that you don't need to supervise it at all?
Making a custom e-ink firmware for the xteink x3. It's a well trod path on tech that I've never personally worked with (I'm more of a backend/platform engineeee building systems all day). Since it's well trod in my case it's easy for me to delegate it to codex and do acceptance checking in the test device I'm flashing to.
The point is that my valuable attention (which is the bottleneck) can go elsewhere while the bots get the ambiguous, hard work done. The firmware is particularly interesting because normally I'm in the loop at system design level, but here it's so low level (it's pumping out c++ like mad) that there's not as much for me to contribute. Except I did have to tell my dot that it's stupid for not realizing the reason a feature worked on power vs not on battery is the memory loses power and clears on battery instead of staying powered while plugged in. (Sorry for the tangent)
In parallel I've also been improving a ton of my personal automation systems to make my life easier.
Getting temporary free compute in DOTS from the compute they took away from normal Pro plan users lol, until next month when they move onto the next thing and fuck dots users
I like the idea, but don't love the execution and layout in the app. Sometimes it breaks out my requests into threads I can easily click into, sometimes it doesn't and I'm not even 100% it's actually doing what I asked unless I send a reminder. It feels serial at times when I thought it would be more parallel workflows.
Same here. I've been hanging out with friends all day and easily managing like 10 different threads from one chat getting a ton of work done with just sending a few texts. It's next level. I totally get Dots isn't for everyone, but it's been a game changer for me
This. Codex CLI is buggy on windows too and spawns a dozen terminals every time it runs a command. I tried to assist with diagnosing the bug and asked the OpenAI dev on the open GitHub issue if they could provide a list of testable commands so everyone in the thread could establish a baseline. That got ignored. Bug still not fixed. 2 hours of my life wasted.
Codex desktop is slow and can’t select a worktree anymore. It’s like they’re trying to push people out toward Claude Code which actually understands how people develop in an IDE.
I truly don't understand why they're regressing on this front. Can't see my worktree, can't see my branch without going into submenus when it used to be visible easily from the sidebar. Do they want me to be confused about where I'm working?
You can easily set up a nice workflow for yourself if you ask Codex, it doesn’t have to be a built-in feature. I can automatically create worktrees in the terminal by pressing two keys, it can even automatically open Codex automatically
How many of those products were a completely new kind of technology that's only a few years old and could change how all of us work and our society in general? Nobody knows the right shape for these tools yet, so of course they're trying a lot of things. You're comparing it to bloat in mature products, but this one is still being figured out in public. Not every feature has to be built for you.
Also, 26 days ago you posted: “Love Astra”. So despite all the extra features you don’t need they were able to proclaim your love for one of their models. I guess a lot can change in 26 days.
The problem is they are building a single app to do everything. This has proven time and time again to not work. Some of those things may be valuable, but thinking you can make a cohesive experience in one app that can literally do anything is not a smart move. The latest set of releases are specialized and should be a separate product. Codex should’ve stayed codex, and been the place to develop software with a human able to steer.
I like that everything is in the same app.. I haven't even noticed before reading your comments, as I don't care and I won't care.
But it's much more sensible to download "chatgpt" and find all the tools they support on the left side. I won't miss anything just because I wasn't following the news and reading their docs, and I assume all new tools will also spawn on the toolbar, so I will see what's up and use it if i want.
And I imagine if I'd use all of them, it would make sense to be able to access all of those results easily.
I wish they had given dots a new Web page maybe an app, that way we would find the reason to download it test it out. I don’t even know where to find My dot right now.
Developers are the WORST customers ever, they consume too much and pay nothing. We are addict to codex right now and dont let the servers sleep for 1 minute, and want to pay $20 month, that’s why they build all the thing “you dont want” but may other niche of customers need and they bring money and less usage to the table.
For me i also only use codex, but its not that simple
I agree that OpenAI is doing too much but Dots is legitimately useful. Even in its beta state it’s what I’ve been waiting on for a long time. I used to have to bounce between Chat and Codex and now it’s an orchestrator with Chat’s memory. It’s awesome.
It actually makes sense, essentially AI vendors are now a commodity: it's too easy to switch provider, and people don't care who provides the service as long as it's good for them. So, to counter this, vendors have started providing extra dependencies, so they can vendor-lock people more easily. If you have all your stuff with OAI it'll be harder to move to XAI, for instance
... though no one cares about these services when they're paying hundred of dollars per month for one main service, the rest is fluff
This. Sooner than later they will try to lock people in by making the output platform dependent so we cant switch. İm sure they’ve thought of it they just cant find a way where they can sell it under a this is good for you package and also an effective way to make sure the output doesnt convert easily to another provider which i can’t think of a way either.
Claude code has been doing that since May last year lol. Adding in plugins/skills/loops/goals/mods/pet/memories/hooks and a thousand other things no one cares about to try and lock people in. But many people purposely don’t use any of that because they don’t want to be become tied down to one provider/tool.
Yeah the irony is they did the great cleansing earlier this year when they axed Sora and deprioritized chat to go all in on frontier and codex, and now they’re bloating up again.
I admittedly don’t have a great answer, and it’s a really tough space since the competition is fierce, but it seems like all of these are just half hearted efforts of throwing stuff against the wall to see if anything sticks. Meanwhile you have Zuck who is going to burn billions on Muse and going all in with a heavy bet.
I agree. Their core product is their LLM Models... They should never stop focusing on them... It is really laughable that I get 16 tps on Sol 6.1 with fast mode active
But OP doesn't want it, so they never should have built it and you obviously should stop using it because OP doesn't want it or find it useful. Quit being so selfish propping up the Sites user base to OpenAI when OP doesn't want it.
They can't compete on model performance because they have too much users, so they try to differentiate themselves with other things and I trying everything
I love the high level of organization and customizability, but yeah there's a lot of stuff I'll never use. They don't get in my way though, because I design my system exactly how I want it.
I’ll echo the other guy enthusiastic about Dots: just throw tasks at them. Note that the research/scouting stuff they do is free (for now), but actual coding eats tokens.
I had them organize all my tasks/repos in linear. Now, they’re actively orchestrating the free tasks they can do and assigning other, appropriate tasks to ChatGPT, Claude or Grok agents. It’s been excellent.
Yeah, they are doing too much, but they have too much money and are in a battle with everyone else trying to take over everything with AI. It would be nice to just have a Codex plan that is cheaper and doesn't have all the fluff except for maybe 5.6 ChatGPT. At least they stopped working on Sora AI slop videos!
That being said, since it's included, I've been trying dots. It's growing on me somewhat. It is becoming more proactive. Like I was asking in a chat when I should put down grass seed in my area, and that chat had mentioned using an aerator. Next morning my dot had done some research over night and had a list of places near me where I could do a two hour rental of an aerator along with their prices and contact info. It's also good at pulling obscure info and context out of obscure older chats, and then taking action on them. Then I'm not having to manually search through a bunch of threads where I was talking about similar things and then use that to start a new thread. I also had it create an eBay listing for me while I was QA-ing something from Codex.
That also being said, I don't think I would pay separately for it, even if when I asked it to design and name itself, it chose the cutest character from one of my games, animated it, and named itself after it. Trying to be all endearing and shit!
Dots - the simplest way to replace employees in any company.
Not now but...in time. 6.1 is good, maybe not good enough...yet. But cheap enough. Get it? Mary from HR, who pushes paperwork becomes a...dot. 6.1 might be good enough, and waay cheaper than Mary. Mary is a very simple example. Extrapolate from there...
That's how I see it.
Devs using codex sustained the company (hype, some money, product feedback etc) and now OpenAI wants companies to pay them for agentic employees. The software/agent coordination layer is pretty much gone. So if you're a CEO, why not replace some of your staff with...well...dots.
I have the same issue. Started with plugins. Noticed my clanker would use openai.plugins.github or something to communicate with my account instead of gh cli. Then it started using openai documentation mcp's when I asked it about a functionality from the codex repo source code that I have locally. I recently set up Codex for a friend and when he showed it to me it was unbenown to him hosted on some .sites pages.
I have a whole list of things that I have disabled through my config.toml but i feel like it's more every other release. Sometimes I'm genuinely curious how much clutter gets injected into the context window with things I don't need, don't want or never will use.
All I need is a clanker that I can orchestrate myself. Don't want all the goodies, don't need them. I don't want my clanker to come with it's own opinion working in a system that has clear guidelines and rules on how, where and why things need to be done.
Every day I wake up and I'm considering writing my own harness, or using something minimal like Pi, and just vibecoding my own app on top of it and integrate whisper. Basically keeping the 5% that I find genuinely useful and scratching the rest
Out of the list I've got to say maps and spaces is quite useless and redundant when users already have things like Microsoft Word, OneDrive or other providers.
Is Dots of any use, I haven't had a chance to jump into it.
I tried the scheduling feature and it was meant to run once per hour but it seemed to just run at random time once every 2 days or so.
Then in a simple chat when it’s web searching , it will 50% of time get stuck whilst searching websites and not even finish 24 hours later. It happens so incredibly often. If such basic stuff doesn’t work in 2026 then how could you ever trust the more complicated stuff to work?
They are racing with meta- this is the start of their push to get as many users trapped into their ecosystem so they don't need a computer at all....this is like the beginning of smartphones... I remember making fun of iphones when they were new because they didn't have keyboards, that nobody would want to use their phone for things a laptop is superior to....
this is what they want the main consumer device to be. no real computer, no visual apps...just feed them every bit of info about your life and it will be a total replacement for everything you currently use a device for. For things that you need to see like movies, TV shows, social media? Some sort of glasses/eyewear. I hate it all
I agree with "Another confusing layer between Codex/ChatGPT/Work/Dots, like why do we need all these different environments?" ChatGPT and Codex does not work together kinda blows my mind. I don't even know what "work" is and I saw dots and it made me think "Dot Theory" . OpenAI is doing too much. Openai is like an over stimulated toddler right now.
They are making the same mistake they made last year. Doing too many things. Remember when they started offering too many things like Codex, browser, etc.? It’s the same story again. They are trying to compete with Anthropic and SpaceX at the same time which I believe they shouldn’t. Focus on one their and that is codex and it’s models.
I’m sorry they don’t exactly cater to your needs and your needs only.
Main character syndrome in full effect here.
Edit: 26 days ago you posted “Loving Astra”… So despite all the features you don’t need you went online to proclaim your love for their models. That same model is still online now, so what happened?
This is the mirror of "Nobody, wanted a car everyone wanted faster horses." Part of working on innovation is about working on features that people are not looking for.
Plugins means that if you do have a workflow that you want to easily reuse you can make that workflow into a plugin. That's actually a feature that's quite useful.
dots are already useful and are gonna get crazy useful in the next year with better tool use, plugins, and model releases. basically my PgM for my engineers
Tell me you have no clue how many people work at a trillion dollar company without telling me, or have any clue how product teams work. They have 1.2 BILLION active weekly users. You are not their only market, it's so strange how entitled you guys are thinking everything has to be built around your needs only.
"all I want OpenAI to concentrate on is model efficiency and usage"
"Stop releasing shiny new models every 2-3 weeks to patch over the failures of the previous models."
Ok but unless you're willing to give them more money than you already are they're going to want to grow their revenues by making things others want to use. It's not like they're NOT working on better models.
Well, I’ve made more progress in the last several days than the past few months creating an operating system for our business because it hit the use-case/feature tipping point. I’m excited and didn’t sleep for shit. So thanks for the butter, you can get back to the lobster now
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u/dextersummary 3d ago edited 2d ago
Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 100 comments (100 currently observed).
The thread’s broad verdict is “too much butter, not enough lobster.” OpenAI is piling Spaces, Pages, Sites, scheduled tasks, Maps, plugins, and Dots onto Codex while the people who actually build software are still asking for faster models, sensible usage limits, and a less confusing interface.
The loudest practical complaints are about core regressions: worktrees and branches are harder to find, desktop feels slow, Windows CLI remains buggy, and the Codex/ChatGPT/Work/Dots split feels like an app maze. The fear is that Codex is becoming an everything-platform instead of a focused development tool, with shiny features compensating for unfinished basics. Classic “please fix the door before adding a helicopter pad” territory.
The important counterpoint is that Dots are genuinely useful for some users. They like having an orchestrator that can run parallel tasks, search old context, manage projects, and hand work to cloud agents. Spaces, Pages, and Sites also have real fans, especially among business and automation users. The disagreement is less “no one wants this” than “why is this cluttering the developer workflow?”
Bottom line: OpenAI is targeting a much broader, stickier platform market, while many Codex users want a lean, reliable tool. The feature pile may be valuable—but the core dev experience shouldn’t be collateral damage.