23 Ways ChatGPT Still Sucks for Work

ChatGPT still sucks. Claude still sucks. Gemini still sucks.

I don’t mean the models. The models are great. People are doing amazing things, and I spend lots of time writing about it here. But all that magic is coming from the models.

The tools themselves are still phenomenally underpowered for what we need.

The tools themselves—the chat interfaces—still suck.

We've crossed a billion users on AI chat platforms. A BILLION. That's one in eight humans talking to machines. And here's the thing: nobody saw this coming, including the model makers themselves.

ChatGPT was supposed to be a research demo. A way to show off GPT's capabilities. Then it became the fastest growing consumer product in history. The model makers have been sprinting flat-out ever since – racing to make models smarter, faster, more capable. They're shipping breakthrough capabilities every few months. It's genuinely incredible.

But that breakneck pace on model development means something had to give, and what gave was the interface. We're still using basically the same chat window from that initial demo three years ago. It's like we discovered fire and we're still carrying it around in our bare hands because nobody's had time to invent the torch.

This isn't the model makers' fault. They're doing exactly what they should be doing – pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI. But it's created this wild situation where we have superhuman intelligence trapped behind an interface that can't even maintain consistent formatting in exports.

The good news? This gap is an enormous opportunity. Open source models have democratized AI. The infrastructure is commoditized. Which means while the big labs race toward AGI, there's room for builders to fix the boring, essential stuff that turns these from clever demos into actual workbenches where real work gets done.

Every problem I'm about to list has a solution. Most aren't even technically hard. They're just... waiting for someone to build them.

This is your invitation to jump in with me. Look at the 23 cocnrete proposals I have here for how to make chat into a real workbench. Tell me what you’d build. Tell me what’s missing. Tell me where I got it wrong. So let's map out exactly what needs building. Together.