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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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At least on macOS, an OS snapshot is a thing [1]; I suspect Cowork will mostly run in a sandbox, which Claude Code does now. [1]: https://www.cleverfiles.com/help/apfs-snapshots.html

Ok, you can "easily", but how quickly can you revert to a snapshot? I would guess creating a snapshot for each turn change with an LLM become too burdensome to allow you to iterate quickly.

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

#152
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:…

Frequency vs. convenience will determine how big of a deal this is in practice.

Cars have plenty of horror stories associated with them, but convenience keeps most people happily driving everyday without a second thought.

Google can quarantine your life with an account ban, but plenty of people still use gmail for everything despite the stories.

So even if Claude cowork can go off the rails and turn your digital life upside down, as long as the stories are just online or "friend of a friend of a friend", people won't care much.

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beachball of death on “Starting Claude’s workspace” on the Cowork tab. Force quit and relaunch, and Claude reopens on the Cowork tab, again hanging with the beachball of death on “Starting Claude’s workspace”. Deleting vm_bundles lets me open Claude Desktop and switch tabs. Then it hangs again, I delete vm_bundles again, and open it again. This time it opens on the Chat tab and I know not to click the Cowork tab...

Can you submit feedback and attach your logs when asked?

I haven’t found any place to do that.

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

#154
post #94
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:…

So the future is NixOS for non-technical people?

Or rather ZFS/BTRFS/BchachFS. Before doing anything big I make snapshot, saved me recently when a huge Immich import created a mess, `zfs rollback /home/me@2026-01-12`... And it's like nothing ever happened.

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

#155

Isn't this just a UI over Claude Code? For most people, using the terminal means you could switch to many different coding CLIs and not be locked into just Claude.

Most people working office jobs are scared of the terminal though. I see this as not being targeted at the average HN user but for non-technical office job workers. How successful this will be in that niche I'm not certain of, but maybe releasing an app first will give them an edge over the name recognition of ChatGPT/Gemini.

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

#156

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.

Maybe not for very broad definitions of OS state, but for specific files/folders/filesystems, this is trivial with FS-level snapshots and copy-on-write.

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

#157
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, yes? What does that refute?

You just said the user is incapable of providing informed consent. In any context, I really dislike software that prevents me from doing something dangerous in order to "protect" me. That's how we get iOS. The user is an adult, they can consent to this if they want to. If Anthropic is using dark patterns to trick them that's a different story--that wouldn't be informed consent--but I don't think that's happening here…

This is not about if people should be allowed to harm themselves though.

Legally, yes. Yes, everyone can do that.

The question though is if that is a good thing. Do we just want to look away when large orgs benefit from people not realizing that they're doing self-harm? Do we want to ignore the larger societal implications of this?

If you want to delete your rootfs, be my guest. I just won't be cheering for a corp that tells you that you're brilliant and absolutely right for doing so.

I believe it's a bad thing to frame this as a conflict between individual freedom and protecting the weak(est) parts of society. I don't think that anything good can come out of seeing the world that way.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you submit feedback and attach your logs when asked?

I haven’t found any place to do that.

Should be a feedback button (like a megaphone) next to your profile name in the bottom of the left sidebar.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At least on macOS, an OS snapshot is a thing [1]; I suspect Cowork will mostly run in a sandbox, which Claude Code does now. [1]: https://www.cleverfiles.com/help/apfs-snapshots.html

All major OSes support snapshotting, and it's not a panacea on any of them.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of non-IT professionals know what zfs/lvm are let alone how to use them to make snapshots?

I assumed we are talking about IT professionals using tools like claude here? But even for normal people it's not really hard if they manage to leave the cage in their head behind that is ms windows. My father is 77 now and only started using computer abover age 60, never touched windows thanks to me, and has absolutely no problems using (and administrating at this point) it all by himself

This doesn't answer the question, like, at all.
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