Posts tagged with "artificial intelligence"

Hands-On with ChatGPT Work’s New Cloud Browser Feature

Yesterday, OpenAI introduced a new ChatGPT Work feature designed to let it navigate websites that require a login without revealing your credentials to the model.

Like a lot of people, I spend far too much time clicking around websites that require a login, looking at analytics and other data, checking whether new sponsors have been booked for our podcasts, and more. It’s a tedious but necessary part of my week that slows me down and takes me away from writing and other creative work. ChatGPT’s new Work feature is designed to handle that sort of work for you.

The feature works by signing into websites using a virtual, cloud-based computer. That separates the browsing session from any browsing session on your local computer, walling the agent’s computer use off from your open tabs, cookies, browsing history, passwords, and other data. Because the login and browsing happens in the cloud, that also means work can continue whether you close the ChatGPT app or power down your computer.

According to OpenAI, an additional review model checks the sign-in request and credential destination for signs of phishing or deception. ChatGPT Work then pauses while the user signs in. Credentials entered through its secure sign-in form go directly to the cloud browser and are not visible to the model. After the user authenticates, ChatGPT resumes its work.

OpenAI also explains that its cloud-based browser doesn’t store your username and passord. Instead, it saves cookies that allow you to return to a previously authenticated session. If you don’t want to remain logged in, ChatGPT’s cloud browser settings allow you to clear browser data for individual websites or all sites.

Similar to other features in ChatGPT and Codex, users have choices when it comes to which sites ChatGPT Work can access. “Always ask” is the default, requiring the agent to check with the user before using a website, but the permission level can also be set to “Auto approve” after ChatGPT checks a site for relevancy and risk or “Always allow,” which OpenAI discourages. Individual websites can also be allowed or blocked. These settings control website access, but consequential actions require separate confirmation.

ChatGPT Work's browser control works best on a mobile device and with simple login systems.

ChatGPT Work’s browser control works best on a mobile device and with simple login systems.

I gave ChatGPT’s browser use a try and the results were mixed. I wasn’t able to get the feature to work at all using ChatGPT Work in Safari on my Mac. Some websites had security measures in place that prevented me from logging in. Other times, the cloud browser asked me to take over manually, but I was unable to do so because the UI was frozen or login panels didn’t appear.

Logging into a site with a CAPTCHA required manual intervention.

Logging into a site with a CAPTCHA required manual intervention.

I had better luck using my iPhone. On one site with a simple username and password system, a login sheet appeared. I entered my credentials, was logged in, and the agent navigated the site to answer my queries. On Apple’s affiliate link dashboard website, I had to take over the browser interaction manually to satisfy a CAPTCHA, which worked after several challenges. Once logged in, the agent pulled and analyzed the data I requested. Also, after I’d signed in to both of those sites on my iPhone, I remained logged in to ChatGPT’s cloud browser, which meant I could also use them from my Mac.

In its current form, the idea of having ChatGPT Work browse signed-in websites on your behalf is better than its implementation. If you can get logged in, having an agent collect and analyze things like analytics data is fantastic. However, getting past the initial login screen is still too frustrating. That said, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the feature, which is available on eligible plans depending on rollout and workspace settings, for future use collecting and analyzing data that would otherwise require a lot of clicking around.

Hands-On with Computer History: OpenAI’s Take on Agent Memory

Late yesterday, OpenAI revealed the sort of automation catnip I love: Computer History. It’s a new feature for Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers that creates continuity for ChatGPT and Codex by converting the actions you take on your Mac into Markdown memory files that serve as context for subsequent interactions. The idea is that with the additional context, ChatGPT and Codex will better understand your requests, requiring you to provide less detail up front while getting better results. Anyone familiar with OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and similar projects will know where this is going.

Here’s how it works.

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The Utility App Flood Won’t Last

The App Store is evolving at a breakneck pace not seen since its earliest days. We saw the first glimmers of what was to come early in 2025, but it wasn’t until late last year that the tsunami of apps developed with the help of AI agents really took hold.

Since then, veteran developers are releasing new apps and updating existing ones faster than ever, and new developers are releasing their first apps in droves. Today, supply is dramatically up, demand is flat, and quality is seemingly simultaneously up and down, depending on where you look.

How these forces play out long-term is anyone’s guess, but it’s worth examining because, just as Federico’s link to Bryan Irace’s post about agentic coding tools foreshadowed the rise of tools like Codex and Claude Code, today’s trends are sparks that have the potential to become tomorrow’s App Store wildfires or simply fizzle out.

Utility apps are on the front lines of this change. The TechCrunch story I linked in April picked up on this trend:

Another interesting tidbit from Appfigures is that the Utilities app category moved up the top five chart.

If anything, the trend has accelerated in the months since.

It’s not surprising at all that utility apps have taken off. They’ve been a staple of new developers since long before agents came along. That’s because many are UI wrappers around command line tools. That isn’t a knock against the developers of those apps; most users don’t want to open Terminal to convert a video or audio file to another format using ffmpeg, for example. By building a great UI around command line tools, developers have made them far easier to use.

However, the relative simplicity and narrow scope of many utility apps have made them a natural fit for AI agents, too. That’s why the App Store (and my inbox) is deluged with Mac menu bar and single-screen iPhone and iPad utility apps.

On the one hand, the abundance of utilities has been great for users. More choice means you’re more likely to find the app that perfectly fits your needs.

On the other hand, though, I don’t think what’s happening in the category is sustainable and expect to see it dramatically shift again in the coming months. As we’ve seen from reporting by The New York Times, app supply is outstripping demand by orders of magnitude, which will drive down prices. That alone is likely to cause the utility app market to shrink. But there’s more to it than that.

Remember, the demand shifts that The New York Times reported, based on Sensor Tower numbers, are for the entire App Store, where download numbers have grown 2-3% this year and last. I expect utility downloads to actually shrink in the coming months – again, because of agents. Utilities, especially simple ones, are exactly the sorts of apps that are becoming trivially easy for power users – the very users these utilities are made for – to create themselves. From frontier labs‘ model improvements to a growing number of app-building tools from those same labs and third parties, it’s never been easier to build a web or native app yourself.

And although I agree with people, like Nilay Patel, who say the notion that everyone will build their own software is overblown, the utility market is different. Your average person is not downloading apps to adjust the frame rate and file format of a video or downloading YouTube videos to watch later. But those are exactly the sort of things that people who are using agents are doing with them, whether they’re having an agent do those things directly via a command line tool in an app like Codex or Claude Code or building an app to do the same thing. That’s going to put even more pressure on the category.

That said, I think there will always be a cohort of users who would rather pay for an app than build it themselves, so I’m not predicting the demise of utilities in general – just the end of today’s frothy market. I also think there remains a place for simple utilities that solve hard problems with clever solutions. Not every utility is a UI wrapper for a terminal command. Plenty of apps feature original solutions or thoughtful and unconventional remixes of disparate tools.

Utilities aren’t going away, but just like other App Store deluges, the trend will recede. It’s just that this time, it’s likely to flip faster than usual.

App Store Chaos→

Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times about apps written with the help of AI agents that are flooding the App Store:

But as with many things A.I., just because something is easy to build doesn’t mean people will use it. It is not clear if vibecoding is breathing new life into the App Store or just cluttering it.

Last year, the number of new apps released in the App Store grew 30 percent to about 600,000, according to estimates by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. In the first half of this year, new apps doubled to about 560,000.

Now, Sensor Tower metrics should always be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t have direct access to Apple’s sales data, so they’re extrapolating from incomplete data that they collect themselves. That said, I think it’s fair to take their numbers as broadly representative of sales trends over time, and the story they tell, as reported by Huang, is interesting.

Based on Sensor Tower’s numbers, the total number of App Store releases peaked in 2016 at 890,000, hit a low of 420,000 in 2022, and this year, is on pace to pass 2016’s peak by a healthy margin. But app releases don’t equate to downloads, let alone sales. According to Huang’s reporting, downloads increased 3% in 2025 and 2% in the first half of 2026, far lower than the growth of new releases.

All of this tracks closely with what we’ve seen at MacStories. One subtle trend I’d add is that whereas for years most developers contacted us before they released an app, a lot of new developers are doing so after their apps are on the App Store. I suspect what I’m seeing is a new generation of developers learning the hard discoverability lessons of the App Store for the first time because when I check out these apps, they rarely have any App Store reviews.

The upshot of all these statistics and trends is App Store chaos of a magnitude that we haven’t seen in a long time. It’s a little like the App Store gold rush of the early days, but without the gold. Discoverability has gone from bad to worse, and the supply of apps is off the charts compared to the demand. With download numbers barely creeping up, the flood of new apps is making selling on the App Store harder for everyone.

Yet, it’s exactly this sort of chaotic disruption that leads to exciting new apps. And, it’s tools like Codex and Claude Code that empower and democratize app development, allowing people who would never have built an app to see their ideas become a reality. Those are things I love to see.

There’s no doubt that the App Store is out of whack thanks to agent-assisted coding, but like any market it will find its equilibrium again. In the meantime, it’s never been a better time to be a fan of apps because while a lot of those record numbers are comprised of mediocre apps, there are hidden gems, and we’re on the hunt for them.

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Running Simulators Inside Claude Code for Mac→

Claude Code has a new simulator button.

Claude Code has a new simulator button.

Claude Code’s Mac desktop app has added Apple simulator support, and although it’s billed as “iOS Simulator Support,” it actually works with any iOS, iPadOS, visionOS, or watchOS simulator you have installed.

The process of setting up a simulator is simple. A new button with an iPhone icon appears when you open an existing project. Click it and a new iPhone simulator pane opens to the right by default. However, clicking on the name of the simulator reveals a list of every available simulator. You can also run multiple simulators at once, but that immediately made my aging M1 Max Mac Studio start to chug a little.

With access to your running app, Claude Code is more effective at debugging UI bugs.

With access to your running app, Claude Code is more effective at debugging UI bugs.

Once you have the simulators that you want open, simply ask Claude Code to run and test your app, and it gets to work, building the app, installing it in the simulator, opening it, and poking around. I loaded up a simple word game I’ve been playing with, and after a few minutes, Claude Code found a UI bug while controlling the simulator. I asked it to fix the issue, which it did, then tested and committed. My testing has been limited, but so far it looks like a simple, effective loop.

It’s also worth noting that Claude Code is running the simulator directly inside the Claude app. This is not computer use, meaning windows aren’t going to be opening and getting in your way as you work on something else. All in all, the addition of the simulator, like the inclusion of an in-app sandboxed browser a couple of weeks ago, is a great update to Claude Code.

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Finishing with Fable 5

When Fable 5 returned last week, I knew exactly what to throw at it. In February, I started a project out of frustration that likewise ended in frustration, so I put it on the shelf and waited. Five months later, Fable 5 was released, and I knew it was time to finish Editor, a single-view diffing tool for writers rather than developers.

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Introducing RemCTL: The Power-User Reminders CLI for macOS and AI Agents

RemCTL in the macOS Terminal app.

RemCTL in the macOS Terminal app.

Today, I’m pleased to release my latest free and open source project: RemCTL, a power-user Reminders CLI that, unlike others, exposes all the latest Reminders features as of iOS and macOS 26. RemCTL supports reading and writing subtasks, tags, sections, rich links, image attachments, grocery lists, and even templates.

It’s available on GitHub here, and it comes bundled with a skill for desktop agents.

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Introducing Shortcuts Playground: Create Apple Shortcuts with Claude Code or Codex

Shortcuts Playground in Claude Code.

Shortcuts Playground in Claude Code.

Today, I’m pleased to introduce something I’ve been working on for the past six months: Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that can create any shortcut for Apple’s Shortcuts app using natural language. With Shortcuts Playground, you can simply prompt Claude Code or Codex with a sentence requesting a shortcut of any kind; a few minutes later, you’ll end up with a real shortcut in Finder, ready to be imported into the Shortcuts app. It’s as simple as that.

Shortcuts Playground is free and open source: anyone can download the plugin from this GitHub repo, where I extensively documented how it works behind the scenes and where you can also inspect the code yourself.

Just point your preferred desktop agent to the repo, and it’ll find the plugin marketplace to install it for you. You can also check out the dedicated mini-site we launched for it at macstories.net/shortcuts-playground.

For Club MacStories+ and Premier members, I’m also releasing Shortcuts Playground as a generative shortcut. It’s quite meta: once you have the main plugin installed on a Mac, you can use a shortcut to make more shortcuts and install them directly on an iPhone, iPad, or other Mac. The Shortcuts Playground shortcut is highly customizable, and I’ve shared a detailed guide for Plus and Premier members here.

As part of this announcement, we’re also launching the completely redesigned MacStories Shortcuts Archive. The new archive is easier to browse with new categories and filters, and it also includes 100 shortcuts that were entirely generated by Shortcuts Playground and verified by me. I figured that it’d be nice to offer concrete evidence of Shortcuts Playground’s capabilities; I think 100 shortcuts should do the trick.

You can read more about the new MacStories Shortcuts Archive here.

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A Dictation App with a CLI Is Exactly What I Needed

Monologue for iOS.

Monologue for iOS.

As I mentioned in a recent issue of MacStories Weekly for Club members, I believe that reliable dictation and text-to-speech are largely solved problems in the AI industry right now for most languages. There are certainly subtle differences between the latest models and not-so-subtle discrepancies when you consider local (and free) transcription models versus cloud-hosted (and often expensive) solutions, but by and large, LLMs have “fixed” the problem of fast and high-performance speech-to-text transcription. Whether you’re using Superwhisper, Wispr Flow, Aqua Voice, or a local wrapper for Parakeet or Microsoft’s VibeVoice, chances are that your transcribed text will be more than good enough these days. Just like with regular chatbots, benchmarks matter less and less: it’s the overall user experience that defines products that are otherwise very similar to each other.

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