Claude Cowork

| 2 min read
AIIndustryProgramming

Since the release of Claude Code, software developers have been living in the future. As Simon Willison puts it, developers have had access to general purpose agents for the last 11 months.

Claude Code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It’s not purely a coding tool: it’s a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be automated by Claude Code. It’s best described as a general agent.

— Simon Willison

That brings us to today, with Anthropic announcing a new product called Claude Cowork.

When we released Claude Code, we expected developers to use it for coding. They did—and then quickly began using it for almost everything else. This prompted us to build Cowork: a simpler way for anyone—not just developers—to work with Claude in the very same way. Cowork is available today as a research preview for Claude Max subscribers on our macOS app, and we will improve it rapidly from here.

— Claude Cowork Research Preview

To me this is so clearly the immediate 1 future of how knowledge work will be done. I live close to the bleeding edge of AI, and it becomes apparent every time I talk to someone who isn’t immersed in the latest AI developments. As Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor explain “AI has not yet diffused through society”.

Thus, the speed of diffusion is inherently limited by the speed at which not only individuals, but also organizations and institutions, can adapt to technology. This is a trend that we have also seen for past general-purpose technologies: Diffusion occurs over decades, not years.

— AI As A Normal Technology

Developers like myself are fretting about how their entire way of working is shifting from right under us — as we type less code and do more. But fields like product management, design, and marketing are not far behind.

Claude Cowork is Claude Code for everything else — and for everyone else. And it’s far from the last tool to shake the ground beneath us.

Footnotes

  1. I say immediate because things are changing so fast that who knows what work looks like in 10 years. ↩

About The Author

Joe Fabisevich is an indie developer who spends his days building Plinky, and a teacher who helps people leverage AI with unique workshops where you learn by building your own idea.

He shares his writing about engineering, design, development, AI, and anything you need to build a company — here on build.ms.

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