Baoyu: Codex's Right Workspace Becomes the Optimal Interface for Agents, Next Step May Lead to Plugin Ecosystem
Baoyu (@dotey) stated that this year, competition among Agent products has shifted from "which model is stronger" to "which right workspace is more user-friendly." Top Agents like Codex, Claude desktop version, Cursor 3.0, and TRAE SOLO have almost simultaneously adopted a three-column layout: a left-side conversation list, a middle conversation area, and a right-side workspace (file browsing, web preview, change review).
He believes this is the natural optimal solution for Agent interaction, as Agents require users to review and fine-tune generated results, and the right workspace is designed for this purpose. In the major update of Codex on April 16, the right workspace underwent the most significant changes, with the most requested feature being "editing generated content directly within the Agent."
Baoyu predicts that Codex's true ambition is "Codex for (almost) everything," and to achieve a complete closed loop, a plugin mechanism must be introduced to allow the community to contribute vertical domain editors and professional tools. Currently, MCP addresses tool connectivity, and Skill addresses execution methods, but secondary editing remains a gap. Once the plugin ecosystem matures, it will solve the commercialization issues of Skill and form an App Store for Agents.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Baoyu's intensive use of Codex and Cursor has revealed that users spend most of their time in the Agent era on "commanding" and "accepting" results, making traditional two-column chat interfaces inadequate. The three-column layout upgrades Agents from one-time tools to persistent workspaces, with the right workspace becoming the core of future competition.
The current plugin market for Codex is still in its early stages, but the direction is clear: the platform will only serve as an Agent scheduling layer, while vertical capabilities will be handed over to community plugins. Plugins can not only meet different user preferences but also establish a revenue mechanism that encourages developers to invest continuously, creating a healthy ecosystem. Cursor is already showing a similar trend, while Claude Code and Cowork have not yet followed suit.
Structural Judgment: This essentially represents a technological replacement. Agents are replacing traditional IDEs and professional editing software through a three-column interface and plugin mechanism, keeping the entire process of generation-review-fine-tuning within the same window, significantly reducing context-switching costs, and pushing AI productivity from "assisted generation" to a "complete work platform." Capital and developers will concentrate on Agent platforms with strong plugin ecosystems.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
A strong model is just the starting point; the interface and plugins are the ultimate factors in retaining users. Skill sells one-time executions, while plugins sell continuous commercial closed loops. Whoever first transforms Agents into scalable platforms will control the pricing power of the next generation of AI work systems.