I have a longer version of this, but in summary

So my understanding of the differences between chat, code and co-work; but may well be wrong!

Chat is the human, talking directly to the LLM - old school. Very basic can create docs etc - but saves in a temp folder. No real access to your local PC.

Cowork / work - Human talking to an agent, which can then use tools to do work. Also runs in a container, allowing it access to your drives/computer.

Claude Code / Codex - No longer in a container, full access to the computer, depending on what permissions you give. No longer locked in a container. + The agent is more focused on coding than cowork / work.

> The agent is more focused on coding than cowork / work

I suspect this difference is pretty minimal. Before Cowork launched I was using Claude Code in the way that I use Cowork now and getting pretty much the same results albeit without the sandboxing (which is more of a hassle than not, TBH). OpenAI says in their announcement that the same is true for Codex, which doesn't surprise me at all.

These agentic loops are pretty applicable to all kinds of tasks, not just coding, and people started realizing this pretty quickly upon their introduction / creation.

This is helpful but ...

What's the distinction between Work and Codex again? Sorry for asking - but they read the same to me.

It's just a focus on coding vs non-coding work?

I don't know why you're downvoted. This is field is so rapidly changing and confusing and on top of that burried underneath a shitload of new marketing terms.

Claude code is sandboxed by default no?