Fuming - ChatGPT just dropped the ball

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:01:29 +1000

OpenAI just broke something that was working fine, in the name of progress. Software developer’s first rule, like doctors, should be “first do no harm.”

I’m a paying subscriber. I’ve been running Codex hard lately - finance modelling work, not so much straight coding - and my estimation of GPT’s capabilities had genuinely grown over recent weeks. Good performer. I was impressed. But not any more.

This morning I heard rumours of GPT 5.6 dropping, so I updated both the ChatGPT desktop and the Codex desktop app. Codex then refused to deliver a working application. After some fossicking, I found the release note:

On July 9, the Codex app merges into the new ChatGPT desktop app for macOS and Windows. Codex keeps its dedicated coding experience alongside Chat and Work, with inline editing in diffs, pull request review in the side panel, faster Computer Use powered by GPT-5.6, and multi-repository projects.

What a clumsy, abrupt change. They killed a familiar workflow with no warning, and the replacement isn’t even live yet.

Yes, they’ll argue it’s a staged global rollout. That argument doesn’t hold. It is simply not acceptable for a commercial application to go dark mid-transition and leave users waiting hours - or days - for restoration. “We’re rolling it out progressively” is not a service level.

And the timing argument is worse. The cutover happened “at night” - nighttime in the USA. It’s primetime here in Australia, and I cannot do the work I had planned this morning. That’s not a minor inconvenience; that’s a broken service contract.

If OpenAI expects business users to stake their workflows on their platform, this is appalling. Full stop, no hedging.

Fortunately I have Claude as a fallback today. And honestly, this whole episode is just accelerating my thinking about building more of my own AI stack - one that doesn’t leave me at the mercy of unreliable mega-corps doing surprise surgery on production tools.

It’s not just me who’s appalled and damaged by this cavalier treatment of paying customers.

Rambling Rows

Fuming - ChatGPT just dropped the ball