OpenAI president Greg Brockman has publicly admitted that the redesigned ChatGPT desktop app is “kind of a mess,” agreeing with interviewer Joanna Stern’s characterization during a conversation published on July 29, 2026. He framed the confusion as a necessary step, calling it “incremental progress towards the future” and committing to a cleaner, tab-free interface by the end of the year.
The problems stem from a July 9 decision to merge the Codex app into the main ChatGPT desktop app on Mac and Windows, while simultaneously introducing a new ChatGPT Work agent and rebranding the original ChatGPT as ChatGPT Classic. Users who had no interest in Codex or Work suddenly couldn’t find their chat history, triggering immediate backlash. Thibault Sottiaux, the OpenAI engineer leading the merger, acknowledged the criticism within 24 hours and promised to restore chats and Projects to the sidebar. An update followed, but the app remains convoluted.
What Brockman actually said
In the Joanna Stern interview, Brockman explained that OpenAI had originally intended to ship with zero tabs, but the current state reflects the reality of iterative deployment. His exact framing:
We were hoping to land with zero tabs, but this is… I think the way that we also view it is that we need to iteratively deploy, right? We need to get this out there, get feedback, and so this is the current state of where things are.
He then committed to a specific timeline: by the end of 2026, the Work tab should disappear entirely, with that functionality folding into the main ChatGPT experience. Whether that lands on schedule is an open question, given that the July rollout already missed its own design intentions.
Codex growth despite the confusion
Despite the UX chaos, Codex jumped from 5 million to 10 million users in just a few days following the merger, which is the consolidation dividend OpenAI was betting on. Forcing Codex into the main app means its user base scales with ChatGPT’s install base, messy interface or not.
Brockman’s “iterative deployment” framing is a polite way of saying the company shipped something unfinished and is now fixing it in public. For Mac users who rely on ChatGPT daily, it’s been a frustrating few weeks with no warning that the app they opened one morning would look and behave completely differently.
The interview also touched on OpenAI’s hardware ambitions, including a rumored screenless mobile smart speaker described as a “humanlike AI companion” for home use, plans for a broader family of devices, and the company building its own chips. The Apple lawsuit and ChatGPT voice chat were also discussed. The full conversation is available on Stern’s YouTube channel. You can also watch below:
Admitting the app is a mess is honest, but the more useful thing OpenAI could do right now is stop treating its paying users as the beta testing cohort for product decisions that weren’t ready to ship.
