Anthropic has taken its first real big step towards making Claude code more accessible for non developers,
and they did this by releasing a brand new feature inside of the Claude desktop app. This feature is called co work. And, basically, what it's doing is bringing some of those capabilities of Claude code, but now into a way more user friendly interface
for individuals who might be, you know, like
intimidated by the terminal or not wanna go through the actual process of installing and dealing with Claude code. So now there's a way to do that. If you've been following Claude code for any amount of time, especially over the past few weeks, you might have noticed that a lot of people are talking about how they want a, uh, you know, more user friendly interface for Claude Code. A lot of, uh, you know, vibe coders out there started talking about how they were gonna try to build these, you know, wrappers around Claude code for people to use that are that are more
that are more,
you know, simple and more user friendly for non developers.
But, you know, that all that conversation is probably gonna end very quickly as Anthropic itself
is going to be doing this. Right?
Now as I'll get into it, you'll notice that this is still far from being as powerful as Claude code, but there are some really cool things that we can do here. And if you've ever been, you know, too scared to jump in the cloud code, this might be a good middle ground for you to start working in.
So when you download the desktop app now, you're gonna see that before we had a couple different tabs up here on the top left. We had a chat tab, and we had a code tab, but now we have a co work tab. Important to note that this is only available right now in
experimental mode for Claude Max users. So if you're not a Claude Max user, you're not gonna see this, but they have announced that it should be coming to pro users over time as well. But for now, just for Max users. So here on the co work tab, you can see we have this new interface here. Alright? Right off the bat in the in the middle, we have our our usual chat interface that looks slightly different now, but pretty much the same.
And on the right sidebar here, we have now a progress bar, which will show these steps as these tasks unfold.
We also we also have artifacts, which is gonna show, like, if you create any visuals or any, you know,
HTML or anything like that, you're gonna be able to preview it here, presentation
slides, stuff like that. And then we have context, which is actually gonna be showing the folders and stuff that you're working in. Which brings me to the point that the whole entire point of this co work now is for you to be able to work locally inside of a folder on your system.
So that's the big difference here. So if you've used Code before, if you know about Cloud Code, basically, you you know, most of the time you're running this locally inside of folders on your system. So that's what they're trying to recreate here. Alright?
When you come down to the the interface here for chatting, you're gonna see right away that we have some, like, suggested,
uh, prompts. I don't really know. I I don't really use these myself, but maybe some people find use out of them. But it gives you some ideas of what we can do here. We could create a file, you know, create a file about topic. Uh, we can then go on. We can, you know, do a document file,
uh, you know, maybe a research report. So this is really cool, you know, for those who who might need help coming up with some ideas of how to use it. It will lead you through all these different, uh, you know, uses for,
uh, Claude Cowork now. We can also do things like, let's see here, crunch data. You can point it towards a folder with data and crunch data,
customer feedback, dataset competitors.
There's so many things you can do here now with, you know, folders on your system. We can make a prototype. We can send a message. Maybe we wanna do a Slack message,
you know, etcetera, etcetera, but we're not gonna be using those today.
I'm gonna be using my own use cases that are really helpful for people who
are using Clot for, like, writing and content creation, marketing, this type of professional work. Alright? Now, the other main thing you need to know if you're completely new is what you're gonna do is come down here to the bottom left, and you can now open up folders
to work inside of. Okay? You can open up folders to work inside of it, and then this plus button here allows you to also attach connectors. So these are basically your MCPs.
So in Cloud Code, you often use MCPs and plug ins. Well, here on the desktop version of Cowork,
we can just use connectors,
which is pretty easy to get set up. Uh, but with that said, I've run into many problems with them. They oftentimes do not work or they fail. But, uh, nonetheless,
we have Claude for Chrome here, and I also have Notion hooked up. Okay?
So the first use case I wanna demonstrate here for co work that I found pretty useful
is basically creating a landing page
for really anything here. And this is actually really powerful use case. It's pretty crazy.
And, you know, you can get a, like, beautiful,
amazing landing page right off the bat. So what I'm gonna do here is
I'm going to go I have a Discord community here for my CoWriter system, which has some training programs inside of it, some different modules for basically setting up Clog code systems and AI CoWriter. Right? And in here, I have five different modules
for,
you know, different different points of building a Cloud Code co writing system. Now what I did was I took these videos and I extracted
the transcripts,
and then I opened up a new folder. I created a new folder here called co work, and you could see I put the transcripts
of each one of my training modules inside of this folder here. So that's it. It's a it's a clean folder with five, uh, transcripts of my training modules. I'm gonna go back here to Claude.
And what, you know, what I wanna do now is basically point Claude Cowork to that folder, tell it to look over all of that material,
and create a beautiful landing page. Let's say I already have one, but let's say I needed a landing page for my my course here, for example. Right?
To give Claude access to that folder, all I gotta do is come down here into the bottom left. I'm gonna choose a different folder here on my desktop. I'm gonna go to this co work, and I have my training videos here. Right? And I'm just gonna select that folder. We're gonna allow Claude to change the files, meaning giving complete access to that folder. So, you know, definitely make sure you back up anything important because, you know, Claude can delete stuff, can mess with your stuff. So just make sure to always be backing up everything you're working on. We're gonna allow it to have access to that, and now Claude literally has access
to, you know, this folder.
Now one also, like, additional step that you can do to make this even better. Right? We can now just ask it to create a landing page, but that landing page is could very well just look like one of those AI vibe coded landing pages. But to fix that, we can use Claude's skills. Alright? And co work is the same as Claude code, is the same as the desktop where we can actually install
Claude skills for specific, you know, knowledge and expertise.
So the skill that I really recommend for, you know, designing your landing pages or front end design is the, you know, Anthropix official front end design skill. Now to get that, if you don't have it already,
uh, you can come over to
Anthropix
repository
of Claude skills.
And to do this, you're gonna navigate here. We have github.com/anthropix/skills.
I'll drop this below. Now this is an entire
repo here of all their different skills.
You can literally like, if you click here, you can see all of these official skills from Anthropic. We have things like,
um, we have things like brand guidelines, canvas design, documents,
uh, front end design, MCP builder, PDFs,
stuff like this. We can download all of these. To do that, we're just gonna come here to the code, and we are going to download the entire zip file. Now we're not gonna use all of these. Some of them are already, you know, automatically inside of Claude, but you can download this and pick and choose which ones you wanna upload. So we're gonna take that. We're gonna unzip it, and you're gonna see we have access to all the Claude skills now, the official ones from Anthropic that is. And we're gonna go back to our Claude co work now.
And to install this, you're gonna need to first go into your settings and put the Claude skill there.
To do that, you're just gonna come to the bottom left into your settings.
You're gonna go to settings here. You're gonna go to capabilities.
When you scroll down capabilities, you might already know this, but you have a entire library here of skills. We have skills that they already have that Claude already has that you can,
for example, just enable here. A lot of these are the same ones in their repository, but some of them are not, like the front end design one we need. So we're gonna come here to your skills, and you're gonna add your own.
Now when you add new skills into co work, you can create them just by chatting with Claude. You can write the instructions, or you can upload the skill file, which is what we're gonna do here. So you're gonna click upload.
We're gonna to grab it from the, uh, zip that we just downloaded.
Alright. We're gonna come here. We see the downloads.
We have all the different skills skills,
and we're gonna want the front end design skills. So we really need the skill to make landing pages and design look really nice and not like AI vibe coated garbage. Alright? So we're gonna take the front end design skill, and all you need is this skill dot m d file inside of it.
We're gonna open it right here.
Alright. And now you can see it's enabled already. We have the front end design skill.
You can read through it here. This creates distinctive
production grade front end interfaces with high design quality. Use this whenever you wanna build web components, pages, artifacts, and stuff like that, which is exactly what we want with this landing page. Alright? So we're gonna come back to co work, start a new task here, make sure we are opened up in
our folder of the training videos.
Alright? So my training videos here, the transcripts, five transcripts, allow to have access. And now we can literally simply tell Claude
to
you know, one of the things I like to do first, actually, is tell Claude to, you know, read the folder and understand what it's working with. So we're gonna tell it, Claude, can you look at all of my training videos just so you can understand what we're working with here? And then after you understand all of it, I want you to invoke your front end design skill to build a landing page for the co writer system, which is the, you know, the program with all of these training videos.
Intel is something like that. We're gonna hit enter.
Alright. And now you can see what's happening here on the right. We're working in this context here, which is our training videos folder.
It's gonna start by exploring the training videos. It's running commands to get into the folder.
It can see that there are five text files of transcripts.
Alright. It's gonna read through all of them. So now I have a comprehensive understanding of the CoWriter system. Let me summarize what I've learned
about it. This doesn't, you know, matter because this is just everything inside of the the text.
What we really care about here is what's gonna happen now. So it's gonna invoke the front end design skill to create a landing page. So it's gonna design a truly distinctive landing page for the co writer system.
Based on the content, alright, it gives a little rundown, and then it's gonna run. Now what's happening is you have the context that it's working in here, we could see everything that it's working in. These are the TXT files, the transcripts.
Alright? So that's the context we're working in here.
We can exit that out. We can also see the progress bar. So now, you know, if you're familiar with Cloud Code, it often puts up to do lists. If not, you know, this is new to you. It's basically a progress bar, a to do list, and it's showing you everything that it's it broke its steps down into and that it's, you know, gonna take care of one at a time. So it's first gonna define the aesthetic, then it's gonna create the landing page,
and then it's gonna add animations, and then save to back into that folder that we're working in. Alright?
So after just a couple quick minutes, Claude created the custom landing page from all of my transcripts of my training videos. Alright? So you could see here, I've created a sophisticated landing page for your co writer system course. Here's what I built. Gives you some breakdown
of everything it did. And now we can literally click this here, and it's gonna open up into the artifacts. We could see exactly what the landing page looks like. We can ask for changes here. You know, maybe you don't like something, you could tell Claude here it'll make the changes.
Besides that, you can exit out of that, and you can also open it right online.
So now this is what the landing page looks like. I mean, guys, look how insane that is that it built that landing page, you know, custom to my folder with the transcripts inside of it. So you look at it here. It's beautiful. It's smooth. It works incredible.
We have the co writer system, the modules, the results,
a complete writing infrastructure built on Cloud Code.
Alright? It gives the whole breakdown. This is all, like, custom stuff to the actual course that I teach
in the training that I that I give in the community. You know, one of the things when I when I saw this, I was like, I love this
I love this this landing page so much that I kinda wanna use it. I already spent so much time building my current one, but I have this problem where I love building landing pages with Claude,
you know, Claude Code or now Claude Cowork using the front end design skill. And every time, I'm just so tempted to to keep using these. So that's how you can build, an incredible landing page for anything.
You know? You just need to get everything into a folder and then fire up this co work and build these incredible landing pages.
Alright. Now for the second use case I wanna show you that I found really, you know, helpful inside of Claude Co work is
repurposing content ideas in in in this type of content and writing work. Alright? And to do this, we're gonna use a custom Claude skill that I developed for repurposing content. Alright? So first, we gotta grab that skill,
which you can find below. It's it's included for my Substack subscribers.
So you can come here. I'm gonna use this content extraction skill,
which basically extracts content ideas from long form content and organizes them into detailed platform specific tables. We're gonna download this skill.
Alright. It's just an MD file this time. Wait. I think we can just download it here.
Alright.
Another way of doing this is instead of downloading, if it's just an MD file, you can literally copy it as well. We're gonna go back to Claude,
back into our capabilities again where we put our skills and settings.
Alright. We're gonna hook up
another skill add this one. I think this time, let's try to write it.
This time, I think we can just write it.
It's gonna ask for the skill name, content,
let's say, content extractor.
Let's paste the entire instructions here.
And in those instructions,
you see this formatting of the description here and the name. So we already put the name up here, so we could take that out. And the description is this. So we need to take this and put it here, and then we can get rid of all this. And now these are the actual instructions. Alright. So we have our content extractor skill. Let's create that. Put that in there.
Alright. So we have the content extractor skill. Let's go into co work, and now what I wanna do is open up another folder. We're gonna change folders now.
I went ahead and created a folder with all you know, I put just a couple test ones there, but, like, the last, I think, six or seven of my
substack newsletters are in here. Okay?
So we're gonna take a look at this. We're gonna allow it.
And now we are literally gonna tell Claude,
using your content extractor skill, I want you to take a look at all of the newsletters in your folder here and repurpose them into new content ideas.
So now Claude is literally looking inside of this folder just for you to see kind of what this folder looks like here. It's gonna look like this.
I have all these different newsletters and TXT file or in markdown files all extracted
from my substack. I also track all of these in markdown already, so it's super easy. So it's gonna look at all the newsletters in my folder. It found six newsletters. It's reading all of them to extract the content ideas.
Alright.
Now it's going to create a comprehensive content extraction report with these content ideas.
Alright. You could see we have our progress bar over here.
And let's see how it goes here. Creating the file, writing it up, and, uh, we'll see what it looks like when it's done.
Alright. So after a minute or two, you could see it ran the skill here of the content extraction skill,
and
it took all those newsletters and extracted 42 content ideas
from the six newsletters,
uh, and we could see some highlights. And then we can click this here, and it's gonna open it up into the artifacts. You could see now in our artifacts, we have a content extraction report.
You can open this up, and we could see. It took those six newsletters and put it into all of this here. Six Claude code for writer's newsletters from December 10 to January 6.
Alright. This this content series establishes Claude code as a complete co writer system, then it gives me a bunch of newsletter ideas, the $100,000
writing stack.
Alright. So a bunch more newsletter ideas that I can follow-up on, substack notes.
What else? Twitter and x posts
keeps going, LinkedIn, etcetera, etcetera. So this is my second use case for using Claude Cowork to basically open up a a a content folder, you know, your archive of all your newsletters or content of YouTube transcripts, articles, blogs, whatever it is, and run it through these types of content repurposing workflows and stuff like that. Super powerful. One of the most powerful, you know, use cases for co work, and you can take this of course, I'm gonna take this, like, way further with a lot more content. You saw it with just six newsletters, but you could take this, like, you know, exponentially higher. Alright? Now the third use case we're gonna wanna look at is using an actual coworker,
um, connector that we can hook up here now to basically
control our Claude Crow. So that's the next thing we're gonna look at.
So to do that, we're gonna
fire up a new task here in Claude coworker.
And the first thing we need to do is come down here now. We're not gonna we don't necessarily
care too much about what's in the folder, but I'm gonna use that same folder with all of my newsletters inside of it. Let's say pretend like that is your content folder or workspace.
Now I'm gonna come to this plus button. We're gonna go to connectors, and we are gonna make sure that Claude in Chrome,
which is right here, Claude in Chrome is enabled. Right? So this is the extension
or the connector that's gonna give Claude coworker
access to your Google Chrome. So we're gonna make sure that that is enabled. Now, how I like to use this for my own personal workflows as a as a writer and creator on Substack is I like to use it for, you know, tracking analytics. Now I do this specifically for Substack
because Substack does not have an API, so there's no easy way for me to basically
track all of these analytics and get them into an Excel file. So what I like to use is Claude Chrome
Claude Chrome extension to basically do that for me. So here you could see my analytics on Substack. If you're not familiar, it doesn't really matter. You can use this for anything, but, you know, Substack, I have, you know, a couple posts here. Let's say my last six posts, I have my
subs gained from them, views, open rate, and stuff like that. I wanna get these into an Excel file into my content folder. So this is what we're gonna do.
We are going to first take, I'm gonna take the exact URL that I want Claude to navigate to, and I'm going to go back into my coworker.
And I'm gonna tell Claude
let's see. I'm gonna tell it, Claude, I want you to use your Chrome connector to track my last
five newsletters on Substack. I'm gonna provide you the exact URL.
And then I want you to create an Excel file
inside of our folder here so I could track, you know, the last five, the titles of them, the high level analytics of views and stuff like that
inside of this Excel file.
And then I'm gonna paste the exact you wanna paste the exact link that you wanted to navigate to, and we're gonna let it go there.
Now here's what it's gonna do. It is literally gonna spin up
a
agent to go on to Claude Chrome. So or go on to Chrome. So you're gonna see it's gonna create a new tab and navigate to my Substack dashboard. I didn't touch anything. It did this automatically.
Alright. So it's doing this.
It went ahead and it's you could see this highlight around my tab here. Means Claude is controlling it,
and you can see the orange kind of glow effect over it. So it highlighted there, and now it's looking at it. What I like to do is literally take this and put it side by side because now I can see exactly what it's looking at. So this is literally
hands free, not doing anything. Claude is
basically
using its eyes through the Chrome
connector to look at my analytics here. So you could see it it realized, like, alright. I see some newsletters. Let me capture these, and it basically captured all of it. So, you know, we have all of these analytics being carried over into here.
Alright?
And then what it's gonna do now is
create the Excel file. So this, I can actually close out. It's done. We're gonna just delete this now and don't need that. Delete this and back here.
And now you could see Claude is going to create an Excel file. Now this is a perfect
example of how things don't work
perfectly inside of coworker.
I still recommend using Claude code if you are, like, a power user, but we could see that now it's running into problems.
You could see that
it is trying to run different things that I don't even know what it's trying to run necessarily or do. But, really, all I care about is the Excel file, and it was able to do that. So I've created your Substack newsletter tracker. Here's what I captured.
The Excel file includes.
So now we can literally click this, and we have an Excel file.
So it used Chrome to basically navigate autonomously
to my Substack analytics and put them all in Excel file.
And now what you can see is it is inside of this
content folder that we're working in. So we have our all of our newsletters here, and then we have the Excel file. Okay? So that is my third
use case, especially for, like, writers and creators and marketers
for using Claude Coworker.
Now just to close out this full walkthrough video on Claude Coworker,
just a couple comments I wanna make.
This is super powerful. It's it's incredible. It's really exciting. It really is an exciting release from Anthropic.
They don't stop cooking up new new features.
It's definitely way more powerful than the regular Claude desktop version or just Cloud web interface.
If you use Cloud for any type of serious work, you should just not even be messing with the web interface anymore or even the regular Cloud desktop. You should be at least in Cloud coworker. And then if you wanna get, like, take it really to the next level, you wanna be using Claude code.
Two major,
major differences, though, that I wanna, you know, just mention
between Claude coworker
I don't know they have coworker or coworker. Claude coworker and Claude code. The first is the ability to spin up custom agents. So here inside of Claude co worker, you cannot spin up custom agents. You cannot create agents.
It has agents inside of it, but these are Anthropix or Claude's own agents for basically messing with your system files and doing stuff like that. You cannot create or spin up, you know, custom agents here in coworker.
To show you what that looks like really quick, if you come over, we're gonna open up Visual Studio Code, and we're gonna look at Claude code in here.
This is my intensely built out CoWriter system here on the left. Alright? And
what I can literally do now is if you see, I have an agents folder, and these are all my custom built agents inside of Claude code. And I could tell Claude, like, hey, write me a newsletter,
and make me a social media post, and do this, and do that, and it's gonna spin up all of these parallel agents to do that work. Right? That is not something that we can do in CloudCowork now. Alright? That is just something we can do in CloudCode.
So if you're interested in building custom agents, which are incredible, you definitely should be, then you need to be using CloudCode for that. Alright? And then the second major difference has to do with just kind of the interface.
So here in Claude,
you can see in Claude co work, we are working in our folder. Right? Our content folder. But you can't see, like, the documents inside of it, really. If you click it, it opens it up on your desktop, kinda messy, you know, not not, you know, super productive. It's not gonna you're not gonna be doing that very quickly if you're working. And that is one of the problems with co work that we don't have in Claude code. Because if we go back to Versus Code, we could see now that in Claude, I can literally, like, look at all of my folders in Claude in the same visual, you know, in the in the same
the same view, and I can literally open stuff up as well. So I can open up, like, system prompts for my agents. I could see it here at markdown.
You know, I can come to my content here, my substack, and come to my newsletters. I can see my newsletters, open it up like this. I can open up, uh, you know, in rich text preview.
So that's something that is really
only something you can do at this point with Claude code in a code editor like Versus Code or Cursor. Right? But those are really the only major, major two differences
upfront that are gonna make the biggest difference for, like, nondevelopers who are working inside of Claude. Alright? So
the,
uh, custom agents and being able to see your documents, that's that's really it for now.
Alright. So that about does it. That is the, you know, your little masterclass into Claude CoWork, some really powerful use cases you can use, especially if you're a nondeveloper,
uh, you know, if you're using it for writing work. I highly recommend taking advantage of this and getting comfortable with it if you have, uh, access to it and if you've never messed around with Cloud Code. But with that said, it is just a middle ground. It should be because if you master this, you really should then move on to Cloud Code because that is where you really start to unlock crazy potential with parallel agents
and, you know, all sorts of different workflows that are still
not possible inside of Cloud Code Work.