Claude Now Has Dispatch AND Projects
Two MAJOR changes in the last few days.
Claude is two different environments for me and I think that holds true for many users.
Claude Desktop is my office environment and research assistant, where I use Cowork to automate exploration I used to do by hand. This facet of the system recently got the ability to Dispatch work, which is Anthropic taking a swing at OpenClaw’s use. Earlier today I started seeing coverage about Projects, which have long existed for Chat, finally appearing in Cowork, too. Now you can make logical bundles of your activity so you’re not counting on some mutable context window to “remember” everything for you.
Once you have a Project in Cowork it’s not just your files, you can add specific skills, a set of connectors, or the curiously named “plugins”. Here’s a peek into what runs on my system - Notion+Slack for business stuff, Claude in Chrome and Exa are for research and testing, and both of my software projects (Healthy Buddy and Parabeagle) come with MCP servers.
The plugins are really interesting. This is a marketplace for … if you combine one of these with dispatch, it’s an agentic environment that will tackle a certain portion of your business.
I just installed the very first one to see what’s in there, and it’s a bundle of Skills and Agents.
Conclusion:
The big win yesterday for the startup was that we got PostHog running. I had only recently got the PLG Stack (Prometheus, Loki & Grafana) installed, which gives me visibility into the backend of our system. PostHog is similar in spirit, it’s a framework for monitoring user experience. You add a bit of tooling to your apps, both mobile and desktop, and the system will lets you keep a close watch on how things are working.
So we’re doing things a bit backwards - the most technical thing first, then where customers and technology meet, and finally I think we’re about to go deeper into business matters by employing Dispatch and Projects. We have some of this done using Notion for storage and Slack for the interactions, but it’s NOT been heavily used. There are a variety of reasons for keeping Notion, no matter what Anthropic offers at the team level, among them the fact that we’re moving fast on the concept that an agent is a thing that lives in a Linux VM we own.
What does this mean for you? If you are not yet using a paid Claude subscription, with the $20/month Pro being the least cost option, you need to go create that account right now. If you’re waiting for things to settle down before you invest time and money you are making the choice to be left behind.
