Feedback: the unified ChatGPT / Work / Codex desktop app is functionally fragmented

What variant of Codex are you using?

App, CLI

What feature would you like to see?

I use ChatGPT, Work and Codex concurrently, often on different aspects of the same project.

The new desktop application presents these as a unified product, but the information architecture does not support a unified workflow.

The central problem is that I cannot see all of my active work in one place.

Chat and Work conversations appear together, while Codex sessions live behind a separate mode switch with a separate history. As a result, I have to remember which OpenAI tool or mode I happened to use before I can find the work again.

That is backwards.

A project is the thing I am working on. Chat, Work and Codex are capabilities I may use while working on it. They should not become separate organisational silos.

For example, one project may legitimately involve:

• exploratory conversations in Chat
• research or document creation in Work
• implementation or filesystem work in Codex
• several parallel sessions in each

I need to be able to open that project and see all of those sessions together, ideally ordered by recent activity, regardless of which capability created them.

At minimum, the desktop app needs:

1. A genuinely global Recents view

Every Chat, Work and Codex session in one chronological list, with its mode indicated rather than segregated.

1. Projects that span all three modes

A Project should contain Chat, Work and Codex sessions belonging to that project. I should not have a "ChatGPT project" and a conceptually separate "Codex project" for the same piece of work.

1. A unified project activity view

Opening a project should show all recent activity across that project, not require switching modes and reconstructing what I was doing.

1. Bulk organisation tools

I need to be able to select multiple existing chats/sessions, move them to a project, rename them, archive them or otherwise organise accumulated history without processing conversations one at a time.

1. Cross-mode search

Searching for a project, phrase or previous piece of work should search Chat, Work and Codex history together.

1. Persistent continuity across sessions

Users should be able to split work into sensible sessions without being penalised through lost context, repeated explanations or excessive token use.

This matters particularly because long-running AI work already has continuity problems. Sessions reset, context windows have limits, and users often need to start new threads deliberately rather than maintaining enormous conversations indefinitely.

The product therefore needs stronger organisational primitives, not weaker ones.

At present the interface creates an incentive to keep oversized sessions alive simply because starting fresh makes previous work harder to locate and reconnect. That is a poor interaction between the token/context model and the navigation model.

OpenAI itself describes the desktop app as a place to coordinate multiple projects, keep parallel work visible and move between chats quickly. The current segregation of Codex history from Chat/Work makes that substantially harder in practice.

I do not want the product to decide that a particular type of work "belongs" in Chat, Work or Codex. I want to use whichever capability is appropriate at that moment while retaining one coherent project history.

The organising hierarchy should be:

Project → sessions/tasks → capability used

not:

Capability → separate history → projects within that silo

The current design feels like three products placed in one window rather than one product designed around sustained work.

Additional information

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