Skip to content

Build1 publisherNot yet confirmed elsewhere3 min readPublished

The Console is a scratchpad now: Anthropic gave 14 days to export, OpenAI gives until November 30

Anthropic's Workbench replacement stores nothing, and OpenAI's saved Prompts and Evals platform closes on November 30. Whatever a team kept in a vendor Console needs a repo and an eval runner it owns.

The Engineer · Build desk

How we use AISend a correction

What happened

  • Anthropic swapped Workbench for Playground on August 18 and dropped saved prompts, version history, evals and team sharing.
  • The replacement keeps nothing on Anthropic's servers, and anything stored in Workbench had to be exported by September 1.
  • In the same week, OpenAI said its saved Prompts and Evals platform will shut down on November 30.
  • In a New Stack side-by-side test of the same PR review bot, Claude answered correctly in 1.9 seconds; OpenAI's Chat took 6.2 seconds and showed no cost.
  • Neither playground is covered by a subscription plan; both run on prepaid credits.

Compiled by The EngineerSomething wrong?How this is made

Why it matters

  • constraint After November 30 neither vendor holds prompt versions or eval results, so any record that is not in a repository has nowhere left to sit.
  • cost The migration bill falls on whoever quietly used the Console as storage, and Anthropic allowed two weeks to pay it.
  • decision Every team that scored prompts in a Console now has to pick an eval runner it owns and maintains, rather than one that ships with the vendor's browser tab.
  • capability Anthropic's runnable Python export makes lifting prompt text into code close to free, which reframes the hard part of the move as history and scores, not prompts.

Stateless is the word doing the work. A Console that saves prompts, keeps version history and lets a team share both is a system of record whether or not anyone signed off on it as one, and Anthropic's replacement keeps none of that on its servers [7][6]. The prompt that shipped and the eval that justified shipping it used to sit in the same browser tab, next to some indication of who touched them last.

Measured from the August 18 swap, Anthropic's export window ran 14 days; OpenAI's runs 104 from that same date [21][22]. The short one is the harder one, because notice of the store closing arrived with the tool that had already replaced it [5][6].

What the exports carry is the part to check before booking migration time. On the Anthropic side, The New Stack reports that a single toggle turned the browser session into Python with the instructions inline, and that the file ran in a terminal without edits [13]. That moves prompt text, which was never the expensive artifact. Version history and eval results are the expensive artifacts, and the features that held them are gone [6], so the repo absorbs the cheap half and something you build or buy has to absorb the rest. The same review skipped testing those removed features on the OpenAI side, on the grounds that OpenAI is retiring them in November anyway [16]. The supplied text also breaks off mid-sentence right after noting that OpenAI had not exported the bot, so there is no recorded result for that half of the test [4].

The performance numbers are worth reading as metering, not as a benchmark. OpenAI's run took roughly 3.3 times as long as Anthropic's [18] and reported about 28 times the tokens [19], but OpenAI's page exposes reasoning and verbosity controls and shows the model's reasoning [17][3], so the two token counts are not counting the same thing. More telling: one side reported a cost and the other reported none at all [2][3]. Anthropic's figure works out to about $0.0000284 per token, near $28 per million billed tokens on that single request [20].

That is a metered scratchpad, and it is not on anyone's subscription plan. Both playgrounds bill from prepaid credits [14], which produced the most useful detail in the whole comparison: the reviewer could not switch off the default GPT-5.4-mini until he topped up his balance [15]. A prompt surface that gates model selection on a credit balance is not somewhere to keep anything you need at 3 a.m.

The New Stack's reading is that both vendors landed on the same position, that prompts belong in code rather than a web console [1]. The vendors did not need to argue it. OpenAI's Playground has existed since June 2020, two and a half years before ChatGPT [10], and is now called Chat [11]; the storage layer around it is what got cut. Read together, the two announcements say the Console is a place to try things, and the durable copy is your problem. The head-to-head answers which scratchpad is faster [12][2][3]. It does not answer which vendor leaves you a clean path out of its store.

What to watch

  • Whether Anthropic ships any replacement for evals, version history or shared prompts, or leaves Playground as a pure scratchpad.
  • What OpenAI's November 30 export actually hands back, and whether eval run history comes with the saved prompts.
  • Whether either vendor exposes eval scoring through a CLI or API that a build pipeline can call once the Console no longer hosts it.

Clarity's read

What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.

Reality

Evidence40
Adoption52
Hype gap+30
Incentives42
Confidence44
Why these scores

Claim ledger

Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.

  1. [1]

    The New Stack's conclusion is that both companies reached the same position: prompts belong in your code, not in a web console.

  2. [2]

    In Anthropic's Playground the bot returned the correct answer on the first try using the default claude-sonnet-5, in 1.9 seconds, using 102 tokens, at a cost of $0.0029.

  3. [3]

    OpenAI's tool also returned a correct answer on the first try, in 6.2 seconds, with color-coded formatting and a view of the model's reasoning; the test used about 2.900k tokens and no cost was listed.

Sources

1 independent publisher whose own reporting we read for this story.

  1. thenewstack.io

    1 article · August 24, 2026

    Anthropic’s Playground vs. OpenAI’s: The week-old tool beat the six-year incumbent

Share your take

Let Clarity write the post for you.

Signed-in readers get a short post drafted on this story in the register they choose — narrative, analytical, or a direct position — editable to the last word before it goes anywhere. The share buttons at the top of this story work without an account.

Topics and entities

Follow any of these and your For You feed starts watching them — no settings page required.

Topics

  • Deprecation and Migration DeadlinesFollow
  • AI Developer ToolingFollow
  • LLM Latency, Token and Cost ComparisonFollow
  • Vendor Lock-In and Data PortabilityFollow
  • Prompt Management and EvalsFollow

Entities

Loading related stories