(aka: How to Wreck a Ferrari With a Shopping Trolley)
ChatGPT’s got Ferrari brains, but the user experience is still a busted shopping trolley with a wobbly wheel. I live in this thing every day, and there are two problems so obvious, so painful, that it blows my mind they ever shipped it like this. These aren’t nitpicks. They’re not future features. They’re basic, entry-level expectations that every productivity tool has nailed since the nineties.
Two problems in particular drove me to the edge.
The first is Projects. When I saw this feature, I thought, “Finally, some order, some folders, some peace. But when I add a chat to a project, it doesn’t move anywhere. It just gets tagged. The same chat clogs up All Chats while also showing up in the project, doubling the mess and doubling the confusion. That’s not filing; that’s cosplay. It’s like tidying your room by shoving clothes into the closet but also leaving them on the floor. Every file system since Windows 95 knows the deal: when you move something, it moves. Somehow, in 2025, ChatGPT missed that part of the manual.
Then there’s audio and transcription, which feels like somebody duct-taped it together at a hackathon and never came back to finish the job. Recording is clunky, uploading is unreliable, and when you finally get a transcript, it just splats into your chat as raw text. No attachment, no project tag, no metadata. Just words dropped into the void. To make it worse, the docs admit the raw audio gets deleted after transcription, but the interface never shows you that. No confirmation, no reassurance, nothing. You’re left guessing whether your audio is gone or sitting on some random server. That’s not just bad UX; that’s how you kill trust.
The damage these two things cause is huge. Projects were supposed to reduce clutter, but they actually multiply it. Transcripts don’t live anywhere; they float around like ghosts. Privacy is left as a shrug. Instead of helping me focus, the tool makes me question whether my work is even safe or organized. It doesn’t feel like a professional workspace. It feels like a flashy demo with duct tape on the edges. A Ferrari engine strapped to a shopping trolley.
And the fixes are not rocket science. They’re so obvious it’s insulting they don’t already exist. When I put a chat into a project, it should move and be gone from All Chats, now living in the project where I put it. If I want a shortcut left behind, fine, let me choose it, but don’t force duplication by default. When I record or upload audio, I should get an instant transcript that’s linked to the chat and filed into the active project automatically. I should see an on-screen message confirming the raw audio is deleted. And transcripts themselves should be treated like actual assets: tagged, searchable, and with a home.
Nobody expects perfection. But this isn’t about perfection. This is UX 101. These are the basics. The fact they’re missing makes ChatGPT feel less like the future of work and more like a school project that never graduated. The trust gap is huge. And the fact that it hasn’t been fixed yet makes a billion-dollar product feel like a half-finished school project.
Final Word
I get it: nobody’s perfect. Teams miss things when they’re building in demo mode instead of living inside the product like the rest of us. But let’s be real—these are basic, ground-floor UX rules, and when you are cranking on the job and can’t find what is what, or where that has gone, suddenly, you just fucked the whole day and more. So, yeah, files that go into folders are just as important as the assistance of ChatGPT’s knowledge so it can understand the context you want to work on.
Anyway, get off of support, and the chats suddenly go into the project folders. Booyah!
I call that a victory. Another success story. We won. Cheers, Ride, for the technical help.
