Claude Cowork
New day, new OMG now what?!?!?!
Monday Anthropic released something that killed about half my workload for HealthBuddy.AI, but Iām cool with it, just gives us validation and room to run.
Tuesday I slept in, recovering from waking up at 0330 Monday and spending all day in the city, and what did I find upon sitting down at my desk? Claude now has a feature that is going to compete with Antigravity for my graphical desktop space and time.
This is getting filed under Agent Harness and itās a YUGE step forward. If you are not a developer you would likely find Antigravity to be complex and intimidating. This will be an evolution of the existing Claude Desktop application.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Just another product eval thing, this matters if you are a Mac desktop user paying the $100/month Max fee. Everybody else just gonna hafta wait.
Coworking:
This is what weāre getting:
Cowork uses the same agentic architecture that powers Claude Code, now accessible within Claude Desktop and without opening the terminal. Instead of responding to prompts one at a time, Claude can take on complex, multi-step tasks and execute them on your behalf.
We are testing for Anthropic. This is what they had to say for themselves in that regard, these are a LOT of constraints. Theyāre going to let the Mac using Max plan subscribers steer the ship before letting the Pro users even see it.
Cowork is a feature preview, which means some capabilities are not yet available:
No projects support: You cannot use Cowork within projects at this time.
No memory across sessions: Claude does not retain memory from previous Cowork sessions.
No chat or artifact sharing: Sessions cannot be shared with others.
Desktop for macOS only: Cowork is only available in the Claude Desktop app for macOS and does not sync across devices.
Session persistence: The desktop app must remain open for your session to continue. Closing the app ends the session.
Weāre iterating on Cowork based on feedback. If you encounter issues or have suggestions, use the feedback button in the app to share feedback with our team.
This stands in stark contrast to OpenAIās āblast it outā ethos. If youāre having trouble Choosing Your AI Model(s), this video is very revealing. Dario Amodei, the careful scientist stung by his fatherās death at the hands of a disease we learned to manage four years after his death, and Y Combinator āmove fast and break thingsā veteran Sam Altman couldnāt be any more different. Their temperaments are clearly visible in how their companies do business.
Rent Theory:
The best use case for this is the complex financial model thatās been created for our startup, but I canāt very well screenshot that and just spam the internet with it, so I am testing Cowork with that next most complex thing in my world: Trump, Brexit, and the Category Error. This is where the Rent Theory of Political Identity first appeared.
This is a novel method of analyzing social media attention seeking behavior, created by Matt over at The Angry Dogs, an extremely aggressive NAFO node.
So thereās public writing, thereās a lot to unpack here, perhaps even some code would need to be generated, but mostly itās qualitative analysis - what Cowork is built to do.
Nate B. Jones:
After I started drafting this, Nate got to Cowork himself ā¦
Conclusion:
Cowork is cool, but my big takeaway from this?
Pay to play is here to stay; if I didnāt have that $100/month Claude Max subscription and this expensive Apple laptop, I would be a spectator, not a player.
I hope you got your free Perplexity, that platform is more important for me with each passing day. If you expect to succeed you need to treat access to quality inference the same way we treated cell phones at the turn of the century. Professionals had them and we paid three digit bills in order to be able to talk freely.
So start figuring out what you can let go in order to get into communication with the future.