Match the Product to the Work
Ask whether the artifact lives in a repo, office files, your desktop, or a teammate that keeps running after you close the lid.
The five steps hold on every product. Products still have a shape: the artifact lands in a repo, in an office file, on your desktop, or on a cloud computer that keeps running after you close the lid. Match the shape wrong, and you will run a correct method on work the product cannot finish.
After reading, you should be able to answer:
- Which kind of artifact does each of the four products take?
- Why not pick by which name is loudest this week?
- After you pick, which chapter do you read — and which do you skip?
Watch where the artifact lands
| Shape of the work | Artifact | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| Implementation, tests, review in a repo | A change you can accept | When Codex fits |
| Weekly notes, minutes, tables, decks, bulk files | An office artifact in a named place | When Doubao Work fits |
| Local files, local apps, a desktop flow you will rerun | A completion on your machine | When WorkBuddy fits |
| Work that must keep going after you close the lid | A teammate's artifact or a review item | When Grok Bot fits |
Codex's official entry puts coding work in the terminal, the editor, and cloud coding — not in generic chat.codex-overview Grok Bot's official line is teammates that sign in to your tools and come back with finished work.xai-bot WorkBuddy's field guide treats it as a work system: finish one real job, then pack the method — not another chat box.workbuddy-guide
Four kinds of tools, enough is enough is about which class you use when you write code. This article is about where the artifact lands when you assign work. They complement. They do not replace each other.
Do not pick by hype
“They all chat” collapses four products into one. Ask instead: where does the artifact land, can the process stay visible, can irreversible steps stop. Hype does not answer those. If a product cannot show the process, it cannot do the assignment this section describes. It can only keep taking questions.
Read the thin chapter, not a manual
After you pick, read only that product's four or five articles: when it fits, one loop, what it adds, how it breaks. Install, plans, and button names are not in those chapters. The general method is already in the three chapters above. Product chapters do not rewrite the five steps.