ChatGPT's Desktop App Now Separates Chatting From Working

OpenAI has reorganised the ChatGPT desktop app around a distinction it has been building toward for months: the difference between asking a question and handing over a job.

The update, which went live on 16 July for all plans on macOS and Windows, adds a global switcher between Chat and Work. Chat is the familiar conversational mode. Work is where you hand off a task and let it run to completion, drawing on the Codex machinery OpenAI folded into the product when it restructured ChatGPT into a super app earlier this month.

The organisational changes matter more than the switcher

Three smaller changes shipped alongside it, and they address the thing that actually breaks when you use an agent seriously.

Chat and Work conversations now appear together in Recents, where they can be sorted, filtered and pinned. Existing Projects show up in the desktop app, and you can start either a Chat conversation or a Work thread with a Project's context already loaded. Cloud Work conversations sync across web, mobile and desktop, so a task started on a laptop can be checked from a phone.

That last one is the useful one. Long-running agent tasks have an awkward property: you start them at a desk and they finish while you are somewhere else. Until now the session lived on whichever machine launched it. Syncing state across surfaces turns a background job into something you can actually supervise, which is the supervision problem we wrote about last week in a slightly more practical form.

Custom instructions get room to breathe

Separately, on 15 July, OpenAI raised the custom instructions limit for Plus, Enterprise, Business and Education users to 5,000 characters, up from 1,500.

This sounds minor and is not. At 1,500 characters you could describe your role and a couple of formatting preferences. At 5,000 you can specify house style, tooling conventions, things to never do, and the context a colleague would pick up in a week. For anyone using ChatGPT against a consistent codebase or editorial standard, the ceiling was the binding constraint.

The direction of travel

None of this is a model release, and OpenAI has not framed it as one. It is interface work in service of a bet the whole industry is making: that people will move from asking chatbots questions to delegating work to them, and that the winner will be whoever makes the delegation feel manageable rather than reckless.

Pinning, filtering and cross-device sync are unglamorous features. They are also what a tool needs before anyone trusts it with something that runs for an hour unattended.