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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

#251

Post by 650REDHAIR »

I tried to get Claude to build me a spreadsheet last night. I was explicit in that I wanted an excel file.

It’s made one in the past for me with some errors, but a framework I could work with.

It created an “interactive artifact” that wouldn’t work in the browser or their apps. Gaslit me for 3 revisions of me asking why it wasn’t working.

Created a text file that it wanted me to save as a .csv to import into excel that failed hilariously.

When I asked it to convert the csv to an excel file it apologized and told me it was ready. No file to download.

I asked where the file was and it apologized again and told me it couldn’t actually do spreadsheets and at that point I was out of paid credits for 4 more hours.

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

#252

Post by soiltype »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #152
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:…

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…

Considering the ubiquity and necessity of driving cars is overwhelmingly a result of intentional policy choices irrespective of what people wanted or was good for the public interest... actually that's quite a decent analogy for integrated LLM assistants.

People will use AI because other options keep getting worse and because it keeps getting harder to avoid using it. I don't think it's fair to characterize that as convenience though, personally. Like with cars, many people will be well aware of the negative externalities, the risk of harm to themselves, and the lack of personal agency caused by this tool and still use it because avoiding it will become costly to their everyday life.

I think of convenience as something that is a "bonus" on top of normal life typically. Something that becomes mandatory to avoid being left out of society no longer counts.

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

#253

Post by bob1029 »

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:…

In theory the risk is immense and incalculable, but in practice I've never found any real danger. I've run wide open powershell with an OAI agent and just walked away for a few hours. It's a bit of a rush at first but then you realize it's never going to do anything crazy.

The base model itself is biased away from actions that would lead to large scale destruction. Compound over time and you probably never get anywhere too scary.

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

#254

Post by hephaes7us »

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…

Why do you even necessarily think that wouldn't happen?

As I understand it, we'd essentially be relying on something like an mp3 compression algorithm to fail to capture a particular, subtle transient -- the lossy nature itself is the only real protection.

I agree that it's vanishingly unlikely if one person includes a sensitive document in their context, but what if a company has a project context which includes the same document in 10,000 chats? Maybe then it's more much likely that whatever private memo could be captured in training...

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

#255

Post by simonw »

hephaes7us wrote: post #254
simonw wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you even necessarily think that wouldn't happen? As I understand it, we'd essentially be relying on something like an mp3 compression algorithm to fail to capture a particular, subtle transient -- the lossy nature itself is the only real protection. I agree that it's vanishingly unlikely if one person includes a sensitive document in their context, but what if a company has a project context which includes the…

I did get an answer from a senior executive at one AI lab who called this the "regurgitation problem" and said that they pay very close attention to it, to the point that they won't ship model improvements if they are demonstrated to cause this.

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

#256

Post by aussieguy1234 »

nezhar wrote: post #233
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on Linux, you can run AI agents in Firejail to limit access to certain folders/files.

Looks interesting. How does this compare to a container?

It uses Linux kernel namespaces instead of chroot (containers are just fancy Liunx chroot)

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

#258

Post by apstls »

Recursing wrote: post #10
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.)

What probability would you give for Linux support for Claude Desktop in 2026?

Is it wrong that I take the prolonged lack of Linux support as a strong and direct negative signal for the capabilities of Anthropic models to autonomously or semi-autonomously work on moderately-sized codebases? I say this not as an LLM antagonist but as someone with a habit of mitigating disappointment by casting it to aggravation.

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

#259

Post by RA_Fisher »

focusgroup0 wrote: post #236

The Death of The Email Job

Depends if the job requires a lot of information and the person is excellent at what they do, bc then AI augments the worker more than substitutes them.

But for many people, yes, AI will mostly substitute their labor (and take their job, produce operating margin for the company).

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

#260

Post by scottyah »

falloutx wrote: post #137
deanc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your terms for Claude Max point to the consumer ToS. This ToS states it cannot be used for commercial purposes. Why is this? Why are you marketing a product clearly for business use and then have terms that strictly forbid it. I’ve been trying to reach a human at Anthropic for a week now to clarify this on behalf of our company but can’t get past your AI support.

Speaking from experience the support is mostly automated it seems and it takes 2 weeks to reach a real human (could be more now). Vast majority of reddit threads also say similar timelines.

Many devs and PMs are very receptive on X
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