Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

But Work gives the model a computer instance it can use for programmatic data access, API munging, etc.

Success cases I’ve had: chat - read the reports in my Gmail and put a counter proposal together.

Work - cross reference all the options with commute time using traffic aware map data. Ground it on drop off / pick up times from each option’s stated rules and hours. Create a table with commute and idle time break downs.

"Claude, prepare me a presentation on XYZ."

I get to work, go straight to the meeting room, and pull up what it made to present.

It's barely coherent nonsense. Lots of irrelevant details, buzz words, wrong charts or confusing phrasing. Obviously LLM output.

I read it out.

When I'm done, I get a question about one of Claude's incorrectly inferred details.

The shame instantly kills me.

This is a scenario I've seen play out with coworkers. Except that last part, instead of dying or owning up to the mistake of trusting LLM output they waffle. Their shame circuit is broken.

I see a version of that all the time and would never, ever do it.

Two years ago, I had no commute, and presentations were tedious ( i was NOT a good google slides user ), I kinda prefer this world for now

e.g. We went from somewhat smarter code autocomplete, to asking chatgpt copy paste, to cli agent running inside your project, managing session, to GUI to manage that, to projects where you talk to a "Chief of Staff" agent that manages other sessions, to who knows what's next.

I think the right interfaces for LLMs right now need to be very simple and easy to change/evolve. And chat still seems to be the best default solution.

The moment someone figures out a new modality for LLMs is when we’ll see the next hockey stick.

Technology folks don’t really understand people and what they need.

This always happens. This is why woz needed Steve.

Steve Jobs is sorely missed tbh. For all the shit he got - he was a true visionary. He lived at the intersection of technology and the humanities… he kept preaching this. And now we are seeing why.

But I don't agree that they aren't product-ized. There are many applications doing calls to LLMs behind the scenes and are hits, leveraging structured data very heavily and not having conversations with users at all. I would say that there is a predictable scope creep from executives to surface a conversational aspect though. We need to bring representation to that so we can point to some other best practice to push back

When casually a friend asks you to ask your Claude something about topic you chatted about earlier and then Claude brings back a secret you didn't want anyone to know yet.

Yes you can set up a project and then ask a question, but this is tedious.

Honestly aside from the voice it uses you wouldn't notice a difference. Switching costs are low, vote with your wallet.

Inside Claude code you’ve got cloud environments and local.

Let’s say as a normal desktop user you wanted to just automate something normal in your work, going to a website (maybe some internal app at your company) getting some data. Depending on what surface you used this will either not work, not work well (cowork), or work quite well but possibly be blocked because of bot controls (local Claude code) or again not work (cloud Claude code)

It was nuts. You can clearly tell these were different teams and products mashed into the same app. Super confusing for non technical users. Hopefully it’s a little better today

There are several projects that injest coding sessions from lots of agents, but for the chat side I haven't found much, except replacements for Claude Desktop. Jan, for example.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html