As a person who's worked in support roles in tech companies and has a working familiarity with Python but is not a software developer or engineer at all, it's been fascinating to watch the changes.
In the last couple weeks, both Gemini and Claude have asked me, "Can I use the computer?" to answer some particular question. In both cases, my question to each was, "What computer? Mine, or do you have your own?" Here I had thought they were computers, in the vague Star Trek sense. I'm just using the free version in the browser, so I would have been surprised if it had been able to use my computer.
They had their own, and I could watch them script something up in Python to run the calculations I was looking for. It made me wonder who it was at Google/Anthropic who first figured out that the way to get LLMs to stop wetting their metaphorical pants when asked to do calculations was to give them a computer to use.
It did make me scratch my head when I was trying to prompt Nano Banana to generate something and it was like Gemini started talking about the image generator in the third person: "The AI is getting stuck on the earlier instruction, even though we've now abandoned that approach." Felt a little "turtles all the way down" with that one!
Giving agents linux has compounding benefits in our experience. They're able to sort through weirdness that normal tooling wouldn't allow. Like they can read and image, get an error back from the API and see it wasn't the expected format. They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly.
Regular default ChatGPT can also now run code in Node.js, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C and C++.
I'm not sure when these new features landed because they're not listed anywhere in the official ChatGPT release notes, but I checked it with a free account and it's available there as well.
Seems like everyone is trying to get ahead of tool calling moving people "off platform" and creating differentiators around what tools are available "locally" to the models etc. This also takes the wind out of the sandboxing folks, as it probably won't be long before the "local" tool calling can effectively do anything you'd need to do on your local machine.
I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...
I wonder if the era of dynamic programming languages is over. Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go (assuming enough training data on the language ofc; LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc.).
Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and more even in my one-off scripts that would have used Python/Bash otherwise. Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem.
This is basically the same functionality as OpenAI Codex Web has, which, if you've not used it, you absolutely should not. What a garbage piece of software. Anthropic is eating OpenAI's lunch.
Maybe soon we have single use applications. Where ChatGPT can write an App for you on-the-fly in a cloud sandbox you interact with it in the browser and fulfill your goal and afterwards the App is shutdown and thrown away.
Has Gemini lost its ability to run javascript and python? I swear it could when it was launched by now its saying it hasn't the ability. Annoying regression when Claude and ChatGPT are so good at it.
Dependancies introduce unnecessary LOC and features which are, more and more, just written by LLMs themselves. It is easier to just write the necessary functionality directly. Whether that is more maintainable or not is a bit YMMV at this stage, but I would wager it is improving.
Wow, it can do what I could do 20 years back using Ctrl+T? The progress! Give them another 10 billion, scratch that, 20 billion, scratch that, 75 trillion. - Written by SarcastAI.
Did I miss the boat on chatgpt? Is there something more to it than the web chat interface?
I jumped on the Claude Code bandwagon and I dropped off chatgpt.
I find the chatgpt voice interface to be infuriating; it literally talks in circles and just spews summary garbage whenever I ask it anything remotely specific.
ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
(simonwillison.net)451 points by simonw 26 January 2026 | 324 comments
Comments
In the last couple weeks, both Gemini and Claude have asked me, "Can I use the computer?" to answer some particular question. In both cases, my question to each was, "What computer? Mine, or do you have your own?" Here I had thought they were computers, in the vague Star Trek sense. I'm just using the free version in the browser, so I would have been surprised if it had been able to use my computer.
They had their own, and I could watch them script something up in Python to run the calculations I was looking for. It made me wonder who it was at Google/Anthropic who first figured out that the way to get LLMs to stop wetting their metaphorical pants when asked to do calculations was to give them a computer to use.
It did make me scratch my head when I was trying to prompt Nano Banana to generate something and it was like Gemini started talking about the image generator in the third person: "The AI is getting stuck on the earlier instruction, even though we've now abandoned that approach." Felt a little "turtles all the way down" with that one!
I'm not sure when these new features landed because they're not listed anywhere in the official ChatGPT release notes, but I checked it with a free account and it's available there as well.
I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...
Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and more even in my one-off scripts that would have used Python/Bash otherwise. Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem.
Compiled is back?
Dependancies introduce unnecessary LOC and features which are, more and more, just written by LLMs themselves. It is easier to just write the necessary functionality directly. Whether that is more maintainable or not is a bit YMMV at this stage, but I would wager it is improving.
> gmail (read-only) # gmail.search_email_ids → any # > Description: Search Gmail message IDs by query/tags (read-only).
Chat GPT App on android disavows having this... In what context does chat GPT get (read) access to Gmail? Desktop app?
What can go wrong ? The next Linux (and BSD) worm will be a ChatGPT based one.
I jumped on the Claude Code bandwagon and I dropped off chatgpt.
I find the chatgpt voice interface to be infuriating; it literally talks in circles and just spews summary garbage whenever I ask it anything remotely specific.