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Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

claude.com

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Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

#61

Post by torben-friis »

felixrieseberg wrote: post #6

Hi, Felix from the team here, this is my product - let us know what you think. We're on purpose releasing this very early, we expect to rapidly iterate on it. (We're also battling an unrelated Opus 4.5 inference incident right now, so you might not see Cowork in your client right away.)

Question: I see that the “actions hints” in the demo show messaging people as an option.

Is this a planned usecase, for the user to hand over human communication in, say, slack or similar? What are the current capabilities and limitations for that?

Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

#62

Post by y42 »

jryio wrote: post #36

It's so important to remember that unlike code which can be reverted - most file system and application operations cannot. There's no sandboxing snapshot in revision history, rollbacks, or anything. I expect to see many stories from parents, non-technical colleagues, and students who irreparably ruined their computer. Edit: most comments are focused on pointing out that version control & file system snapshot exists:…

Indeed there are and this is no rocket science. Like Word Documents offer a change history, deleted files go to the trash first, there are undo functions, TimeMachine on MacOs, similar features on Windows, even sandbox features.

Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

#63

Post by hk__2 »

falloutx wrote: post #5

Can humans do nothing now? Is it harder to organise your desktop? I thought Apple already organises them into stacks. (edit: Apple already does this) Is it that hard to check your calendar? Also feels insincere to have a meeting of say 30 mins to show a claude made deck that you did it in 4 seconds.

I don’t think this is for _hard_ things but rather for repetitive tasks, or tasks where a human would bring no value. I’ve used Claude for Chrome to search for stays in Airbnb for example; something that is not hard but takes a lot of time to do by hand when you have some precise requirements.

Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

#64

Post by martinald »

felixrieseberg wrote: post #6

Hi, Felix from the team here, this is my product - let us know what you think. We're on purpose releasing this very early, we expect to rapidly iterate on it. (We're also battling an unrelated Opus 4.5 inference incident right now, so you might not see Cowork in your client right away.)

Hey, congrats on the launch. Been thinking lot about this space (wrote this back in August: https://martinalderson.com/posts/building-a-tax-agent-with-c...).

Would love to connect, my emails in my bio if you have time!

Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

#65

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

nikkwong wrote: post #58
toddmorey wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Q: What would prevent them from using git style version control under the hood? User doesn’t have to understand git, Claude can use it for its own purposes.

You can’t easily snapshot the current state of an OS and restore to that state like with git.

Well there is cri-u for what its worth on linux which can atleast snapshot the state of an application and I suppose something must be similar available for filesystems as well

Also one can simply run a virtual machine which can do that but then the issue becomes in how apps from outside connect to vm inside

Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

#66

Post by TIPSIO »

hypfer wrote: post #26

People do realize that if they're doing this, they're not feeding "just" code into some probably logging cloud API but literally anything (including, as mentioned here, bank statements), right? Right? RIGHT?????? Are you sure that you need to grant the cloud full access to your desktop + all of its content to sort elements alphabetically?

Have you ever used any Anthropic AI product? You cannot literally do anything without big permissions, warnings, or annoying always-on popup warning you about safety.

Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

#67

Post by redfloatplane »

simonw wrote: post #35
redfloatplane wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do get a "Setting up Claude's workspace" when opening it for the first time - it appears that this does do some kind of sandboxing (shared directories are mounted in).

It looks like they have a sandbox around file access - which is great! - but the problem remains that if you grant access to a file and then get hit by malicious instructions from somewhere those instructions may still be able to steal that file.

It seems there's at least _some_ mitigation. I did try to have it use its WebFetch tool (and curl) to fetch a few websites I administer and it failed with "Unable to verify if domain is safe to fetch. This may be due to network restrictions or enterprise security policies blocking claude.ai." It seems there's a local proxy and an allowlist - better than nothing I suppose.

Looks to me like it's essentially the same sandbox that runs Claude Code on the Web, but running locally. The allowlist looks like it's the same - mostly just package managers.

Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

#68

Post by brushfoot »

simonw wrote: post #44
cc62cf4a4f20 wrote: post #32

It's really quite amazing that people would actually hook an AI company up to data that actually matters. I mean, we all know that they're only doing this to build a training data set to put your business out of business and capture all the value for themselves, right?

A few months ago I would have said that no, Anthropic make it very clear that they don't ever train on customer data - they even boasted about that in the Claude 3.5 Sonnet release back in 2024: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-5-sonnet > One of the core constitutional principles that guides our AI model development is privacy. We do not train our generative models on user-submitted data unless a user gives us…

To me this is the biggest threat that AI companies pose at the moment.

As everyone rushes to them for fear of falling behind, they're forking over their secrets. And these users are essentially depending on -- what? The AI companies' goodwill? The government's ability to regulate and audit them so they don't steal and repackage those secrets?

Fifty years ago, I might've shared that faith unwaveringly. Today, I have my doubts.

Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

#69

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

oblio wrote: post #53
seunosewa wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason why Claude can't use git to manage the folders that it controls.

Git isn't good with big files. I wanted to comment more, but this new tool is Mac only for now, so there isn't much of a point.

git with lfs

There is also xet by huggingface which tries to make git work better with big files

Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

#70

Post by EMM_386 »

Flux159 wrote: post #4

This looks useful for people not using Claude Code, but I do think that the desktop example in the video could be a bit misleading (particularly for non-developers) - Claude is definitely not taking screenshots of that desktop & organizing, it's using normal file management cli tools. The reason seems a bit obvious - it's much easier to read file names, types, etc. via an "ls" than try to infer via an image. But it a…

> Claude is definitely not taking screenshots of that desktop & organizing, it's using normal file management cli tools

Are you sure about that?

Try "claude --chrome" with the CLI tool and watch what it does in the web browser.

It takes screenshots all the time to feed back into the multimodal vision and help it navigate.

It can look at the HTML or the JavaScript but Claude seems to find it "easier" to take a screenshot to find out what exactly is on the screen. Not parse the DOM.

So I don't know how Cowork does this, but there is no reason it couldn't be doing the same thing.

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