Nathaniel Whittemore

We kick off today with an interesting new feature announcement from OpenAI.

The company has shipped a new memory feature in Codex called Chronicle.

This is something that we've seen a couple times from a couple different companies, although it's usually been surrounded by some amount of controversy, and in the case of Microsoft, a withdrawal of the feature entirely.

Chronicle uses screen captures to build a running memory of your workflow.

The feature runs as a background agent, taking screenshots and deciphering them to build memory as you work.

Now, OpenAI framed the feature as being a quality of life improvement by improving Codex's understanding of your work.

They write, Now they did warn that because Chronicle runs as a background agent, it will chew through usage limits.

Screenshots also carry some privacy and access concerns.

All my old Bitcoin buddies are screaming at their screens right now as I talk about this.

Yet it's pretty clear that OpenAI is aiming this at professionals who are working on secure systems with their company picking up the tab on usage.

Apparently, the feature is impressed internally with President Greg Brockman writing that it feels, quote, surprisingly magical to use, and Sam Altman saying the internal working name for this was telepathy, and it feels like it.

Codex developer Tebow wrote, This is early and consumes quite a bit of tokens, but it has changed how I and many folks at OpenAI use Codex.

Now, like I said, when these types of features were first announced, they were announced as general Windows-type features, as opposed to something very discreet for a specific type of builder in a specific use case, and maybe for people the balance on the value of that context changes how people will receive it.

I've always sort of thought that this was one of those features that one group who is used to an old way of doing things will think is a complete privacy nightmare, but in the future people will just assume is completely normal.

Staying on new features for a moment, Anthropic has shipped a new feature for Cowork that they're calling Live Artifacts.

The feature allows users to build dashboards and trackers using live data feeds from connected apps.

Cowork developer Felix Riesberg showed off the flexibility of the new feature.

In one example, the feature produced a personalized morning brief including a meeting schedule, correspondence summary, and key status indicators.

In another, the feature produced a dashboard for a fictional lunar mission.

It feels to me like a lot of these features from both Anthropic and OpenAI are in some ways, quote unquote, just UX upgrades on stuff you could already do.