Is anybody out there actually being more productive in their office work by using AI like this? AI for writing code has been amazing but this office stuff is a really hard sell for me. General office/personal productivity seems to be the #1 use-case the industry is trying to sell but I just don't see it. What am I missing here?
Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
171–180 of 593 posts
Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
#172I was hoping for a moment that this meant they had come up with a design that was safe against lethal trifecta / prompt injection attacks, maybe by running everything in a tight sandbox and shutting down any exfiltration vectors that could be used by a malicious prompt attack to steal data. Sadly they haven't completely solved that yet. Instead their help page at https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13364135-using-…
Worth calling out that execution runs in a full virtual machine with only user-selected folders mounted in. CC itself runs, if the user set network rules, with https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime . There is much more to do - and our docs reflect how early this is - but we're investing in making progress towards something that's "safe".
Do the folders get copied into it on mounting? it takes care of a lot of issues if you can easily roll back to your starting version of some folder I think. Not sure what the UI would look like for that
Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
#173Can 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.
Agree. Seems to me that if you need something like this to automate your workflow; it's your workflow that needs to change.
Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first version is for macOS, which has snapshots [1] and file versioning [2] built-in. [1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2024/04/08/apfs-snapshots/ [2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/09/04/explainer-the-macos-vers...
RSX-11M for the PDP-11 had filesystem versioning back in the early 1980s, if not earlier.
And if they were releasing Cowork for RSX-11M, that might be relevant.
Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
#175I'm a bit shocked to see so many negative comments here on HN. Yes, there are security risks and all but honestly this is the future. It's a great amplifier for hackers and people who want to get stuff done. It took some training but I'm now starting almost all tasks with claude code: need to fill out some word document, organize my mail inbox, write code, migrate blog posts from one system to another, clean up my co…
> I'm a bit shocked to see so many negative comments here on HN. Yes, there are security risks and all but honestly this is the future. It's a great amplifier for hackers and people who want to get stuff done. TBH this comment essentially reads as "other commenters are dumb, this is the future b/c I said so, get in line". No, this doesn't need to be the future. There's major implications to using AI like this and man…
I certainly don't think people on HN are dumb, I'm surprised that the sentiment towards this is just talking so much about the downside and not the upside.
And look I do agree that humans should be the one responsible for the things they prompt and automate.
What I understand is that you let this lose in a folder and so backups and audits are possible.
Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
#176I cannot read the pages on the Claude website. I am using pi-hole and that causes text not being rendered. Annoying.
Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
#177I’ve tried just about every system for keeping my desktop tidy: folders, naming schemes, “I’ll clean it on Fridays,” you name it. They all fail for the same reason: the desktop is where creative work wants to spill out. It’s fast, visual, and forgiving. Cleaning it is slow, boring, and feels like admin.
Claude Cleaner, I mean Cowork will be sweeping my desktop every Friday.
Im sure itll be useful for more stuff but man…
Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
#178People 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?
Some do, some don't. The reality is there are some of us who truly just don't care. The convenience outweighs the negative. Yesterday I told an agent, "here's my api key and my root password - do it for me". Privacy has long since been dead, but at least for myself opsec for personal work is too.
> The convenience outweighs the negative. Yesterday I told an agent, "here's my api key and my root password - do it for me".
Does the security team at your company know you're doing this?
Security as a whole is inconvenient. That doesn't mean we should ignore it.
Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
#179I was hoping for a moment that this meant they had come up with a design that was safe against lethal trifecta / prompt injection attacks, maybe by running everything in a tight sandbox and shutting down any exfiltration vectors that could be used by a malicious prompt attack to steal data. Sadly they haven't completely solved that yet. Instead their help page at https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13364135-using-…
Worth calling out that execution runs in a full virtual machine with only user-selected folders mounted in. CC itself runs, if the user set network rules, with https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime . There is much more to do - and our docs reflect how early this is - but we're investing in making progress towards something that's "safe".
I'm embarrassed to say this is the first time I've heard about sandbox-exec (macOS), though I am familiar with bubblewrap (Linux). Edit: And I see now that technically it's deprecated, but people still continue to use sandbox-exec even still today.
Re: Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
#180Every startup is at the mercy of the big 3 (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google). They can and most likely will release something that vaporises the thin moat you have built around their product. This feels like the first time in tech where there are more startups/products being subsumed (agar.io style) than being created.
Best defense is to basically stay small/niche enough that the big guys don't think your work is worth consuming/competing with directly.
There will always be a market for dedicated tools that do really specific things REALLY well.