The cognitive cost of constantly adapting to ChatGPT is starting to add up : cognitive scientist/PhD student lived experience

I use ChatGPT a lot. Probably a lot more than is reasonable. I read David Robinson’s Atlantic piece today about leaving OpenAI and his criticism of its culture of trial-and-error / “iterative deployment". Obviously, AI safety on the world stage and annoying product changes aren’t remotely the same stakes, but some of what he described felt weirdly familiar from the user side I’m doing a PhD and work in research, and it’s become part of how I write, code, read papers, manage projects and think through problems. So on paper, Spaces/Pages and many new "workspace" features should be my thing and get me excited. And yet I don’t think I’ll use it. It’s mostly a trust problem. My basic mental model of ChatGPT keeps changing under my feet. Projects were supposed to give ongoing work some persistent context. Then Work arrived with a pretty different way of doing things, local/cloud became another distinction to understand, and now Spaces and Pages add another layer. At this point, I swear the difference between ChatGPT Work and Codex is a Navier-Stokes problem. Pages itself also feels a lot like the old Codex interface, now wrapped in persistent storage. After trying it yesterday, I still think the Chat + Codex side-by-side setup we had in Chat 3 years ago made more sense lol. I would buy that feature again anytime over this new thing. Since Work appeared, every big announcement leaves me wondering if regular Chat is eventually going away. It’s still my go-to for brainstorming, but somehow it seems left out of a lot of the new stuff. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Then web, desktop, local and cloud all behave differently, with even more differences between Windows, Mac, Linux and iOS. I sometimes end up asking a Pro model what ChatGPT can actually do this month. That’s where we’re at. The cherry on the sundae is that a lot of it still feels half-baked. A collaborative writing feature without tracked changes... do these guys actually write together? lol I have ADHD. AI is amazing for exploring ideas because I can follow a thought immediately instead of losing it. But when the tool itself becomes something I need to constantly understand, I end up exploring ChatGPT/Codex instead of doing whatever I opened ChatGPT to do. I change the setup, forget why I made some decision, revisit it, lose the thread... At this point some models still lose context, I lose context, and it starts to feel like OpenAI has lost the context of its users a while ago. They try to sell the next idea with a lot of smiles while most of their users are still trying to build something around the previous one and just don't care anymore. That cognitive cost is starting to be a bit much for me. I already spend my days keeping track of papers, manuscripts, datasets, deadlines and projects. I don’t want part of my job to be relearning the tool I’m using to do my job. It starts feeling like I’m beta-testing a product while depending on it. So, as someone who should probably be a target user for Spaces: thanks, but no thanks for now. Can you please keep what already works reasonably stable, and maybe warn us before making major changes? Until then, my notes will stay in Obsidian, papers in my reference manager, manuscripts in Word, and code/data in normal folders and repos. I’m very happy for ChatGPT to work across all of that. I just don’t trust the product enough yet to build the structure of my work inside it. submitted by /u/jaydeelive01 [link] [comments]

Source: r/ChatGPT | 2026-10-03

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