ChatGPT Work Tool and Skill Reference
- ID
- 20142
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 31 Aug 2026, 10:07 PM
- Fetched
- 02 Sep 2026, 5:57 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://codex-tool-reference.simonw.chatgpt.site/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.5
- Created
- 02 Sep 2026, 5:59 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_agent_users
What happened
Simon Willison published a complete snapshot (dated 31 Aug 2026) of the callable tool interfaces and skill definitions available inside a ChatGPT Work (Codex) session: 232 tool interfaces, 44 skill definition files totaling 615k characters. Skills cover document creation (.docx/Google Docs with render-and-verify workflows), spreadsheets (.xlsx/.csv with formulas and charts), PowerPoint/Google Slides decks, PDF generation/inspection via Poppler and reportlab, image generation, charts, interactive learning widgets, and in-conversation visualizations.
Why it matters
If you are building workflows on top of ChatGPT Work or evaluating it against other agent platforms, this inventory lets you see exactly which capabilities are built-in versus what you'd need to wire up yourself. The document skill's strict render-and-verify loop (generating page PNGs via render_docx.py before delivery) and the PDF skill's specific toolchain (Poppler, reportlab, pdfplumber, pypdf) tell you what quality bar to expect and whether your use case is already covered.
Discussion angle
Compare the 44 built-in skills against what you currently hand-build in your own agent pipelines — which of these (e.g., the render-and-verify document workflow) are worth copying as patterns even if you don't use ChatGPT Work?