ChatGPT folds Work into the main chat in December, and Codex starts sharing your allowance

OpenAI is tidying up the ChatGPT desktop app, and the tidying comes with a meter. Starting in December, the Chat and Work tabs become a single experience, and Plus, Pro and Business subscribers will draw on one usage allowance for both ChatGPT and Codex, ZDNET's Kayla Solino reported, based on an OpenAI help page and an email to customers.

What actually changes

Today the desktop app has two sections, ChatGPT and Codex, and the ChatGPT side is split again into Chat and Work. Work, the agentic mode that takes a task and carries it out with your files and plugins, moves into the main chat. Codex stays its own section.

The bigger change is accounting. Usage will be counted in tokens, and how fast you go through the allowance depends on which model you choose and how heavy the task is. Advanced models and complex jobs cost more. Instant chat won't count at all. OpenAI will try the merged version with a subset of users before a wider rollout.

The company's line is that most people won't notice, and that most users won't wait for resets more often than they do now. It also admits that, depending on usage and model, some will.

Why developers should care

If you use Codex heavily and also hand ChatGPT agentic tasks, those two habits now eat from the same bowl. A long research job in chat could cost you coding time later in the week, and the reverse. Budgeting shifts from counting messages to counting tokens per model.

It fits a pattern. Anthropic merged Claude's chat and Cowork into one screen in September, ZDNET notes. Across the industry, flat-rate plans keep running into agents that can work for a long time on one request, and the fix keeps being the same: meter the tokens.

(ZDNET discloses that its parent company, Ziff Davis, is suing OpenAI over copyright.)

Scoreboard update: Draw. One tab that does everything, paid for from one shared allowance.

Stay undead.