What's this about?
A complete reference of ChatGPT Work's tools and skills, published a day after his prose explainer of what the product can do. Between them they are the documentation the product does not ship with.
Why does a third party end up writing this?
Because the capability exists and the description of it doesn't. Willison's characterisation — "deeply confusing but extremely powerful" — is precise: the features are real and the affordances don't communicate. Extracting the tool list is the systematic version of the same job, and it is the kind of artifact that only appears when enough people want to know and nobody official will say.
What's the community saying?
HN 184 points, 51 comments
- Mollick's reaction is the one that spread: the labs need to stop making Simon (and, to a lesser extent, him) explain the modes they release — "you have an AI that can write documentation!"
- The reference is more useful than the explainer for anyone building on it, and it is the second of the two to appear, which says something about how the community learns these products.
- It closes the loop on his question from a few days ago about when to use Chat versus Work, which nobody could answer.