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Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

claude.com

181–190 of 593 posts

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

#181

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.

> For most people Most people have no idea what a terminal is.

I guess they’re bringing Claude Code tools like filesystem access and bash to their UI. And running it in a “sandbox” of sorts. I could get behind this for users where the terminal is a bit scary.

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

#182
I wrote up some first impressions of Claude Cowork here, including an example of it achieving a task for me (find the longest drafts in my blog-drafts folder from the past three months that I haven't published yet) with screenshots.

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/12/claude-cowork/

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

#184
This is a great idea! I'm building something very similar with https://practicalkit.com , which is the same concept done differently.

It will be interesting for me, trying to figure out how to differentiate from Claude Cowork in a meaningful way, but theres a lot of room here for competition, and no one application is likely to be "the best" at this. Having said that, I am sure Claude will be the category leader for quite a while, with first mover advantage.

I'm currently rolling out my alpha, and am looking for investment & partners.

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

#185
For those worried about irrevocable changes, sometimes a good plan is all the output.

Claude Code is very good at `doc = f(doc, incremental_input)` where doc is a code file. It's no different if doc is a _prompt file_ designed to encapsulate best practices.

Hand it a set of unstructured SOP documents, give it access to an MCP for your email, and have it gradually grow a set of skills that you can then bring together as a knowledge base auto-responder instruction-set.

Then, unlike many opaque "knowledge-base AI" products, you can inspect exactly how over-fitted those instructions are, and ask it to iterate.

What I haven't tried is whether Cowork will auto-compact as it goes through that data set, and/or take max-context-sized chunks and give them to a sub-agent who clears its memory between each chunk. Assuming it does, it could be immensely powerful for many use cases.

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

#186
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

dann halt nicht

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

#188
post #77
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trash is a shell feature. Unless a program explicitly "moves to trash", deleting is final. Same for Word documents. So, no, there is no undo in general. There could be under certain circumstances for certain things.

I mean, I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to tell it to move files to the trash instead of deleting them. Honestly, I thought that on Windows and Mac, the default is to move files to the trash unless you explicitly say to permanently delete them.

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

#189
post #77
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trash is a shell feature. Unless a program explicitly "moves to trash", deleting is final. Same for Word documents. So, no, there is no undo in general. There could be under certain circumstances for certain things.

Shell? You meant Finder I think?

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

#190
post #117
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?

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.

HN is now where I get my daily does[1] of apathetic indifference/go with the flow attitude.

[1] * dose

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