Claude Cowork is here. And if you understand how to use it, you're gonna be able to outperform
99%
of people on this planet.
It is an easy way for you to use Claude Code. You might have heard of Claude Code. It's gone viral. But the problem is it feels technical. You have to go into the terminal
and it's not fun for a lot of beginners. So Claude has come up with Cowork, and it's a brand new product that
harnesses the power of Claude Code in a UI that is simple, that anyone could use, that your dad can use, your mom could use, hey, even you can use. So in this episode, I brought on Boris, the maker of this product. I'm so excited that he shows you the best practices
for how to use
Claude Cowork, and at the end,
how he sets up his Claude code to get the most out of it. You're gonna love this episode.
We are lucky. We've got Boris. He's the creator of Claude Code, and I would say the cocreator of Claude Cowork today.
And today, what I wanna get accomplished is everyone's talking about Cowork, and I wanna best understand what are the use cases, how can we get started, what are some non obvious ways I can use it. So Boris, thank you so much for coming on the show. And
I have one question for you. By the end of this episode,
what are people gonna get out of it?
Oh.
I think people are gonna
start to get some more ideas for how to use co work.
And hopefully they're gonna tweet about it and maybe they'll even reach out to me so I could learn how they
wanna use CoWork. It's funny. I feel like
QuadCode from the beginning, it was sort of built to be it wasn't actually built to be a product at all. But when we first started thinking about it as a product,
we thought that the thing people would use it for is coding.
But we've learned very quickly that people didn't just use it for coding. They used it for, like, all sorts of stuff. So I I kind of feel the journey of Cloud Code has been very surprising.
And I have been learning so much just watching how people use the product and how they abuse it and kinda like what what they actually want to use it for and even if it's not designed for that.
So I kinda feel the same way about Coworka. Know, I have some ideas about what people are gonna use it for. I kind of view these as hypotheses.
And so, you know, happy to talk about it. Happy to maybe I'll do a quick demo to to show you kind of some of the some of the things that we use it for. But I think that it's gonna be pretty surprising,
and I hope that I will be surprised
when we see how people actually use it in the wild.
Yeah. I think that's always the case with with platforms especially if you think about it like when when the makers of the App Store created the App Store, you know, the the initial apps was, like, you know, a beer drinking app and, like, a bunch of random apps like that. Did they know that, you know, Uber was gonna come out of that, DoorDash was gonna come out of that, TikTok was gonna come out of that? Probably not. So I think that what's really cool about the phase that we are in right now with Claude Code and also Claude Cowork is
we're all figuring it out at the same time.
And
none of us, including the creator, have all the answers, but I agree with you. Like, what's
it's it's a good time to be sharing some you know, sharing
what's working, what's not working. And, you know, if you're open to it, let's let's
screen share and and get our hands dirty.
Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. So what are we looking at right now, Boris?
Yeah. So this is the this is the cloud desktop app. So you just download it.
Cowork is only available for Mac OS,
you know, Windows coming soon.
There's a few different tabs in the desktop app. So there's the chat, that's the default. There's co work, that's the new one, and there's code, and that's just quad code.
Co work under the hood, it's actually just quad code. And so, you know, the agent that makes quad code awesome, we call it the quad agent. It's also available as the quad agent SDK, you can use it programmatically. You can you know, all all sorts of companies build all sorts of cool things on top of it. We actually use that same exact SDK directly in Corework.
So it's like, you know, it's pretty cool. It's just kinda one way across everything. We have the best agent, have the best agentic model, might as well use it.
And so what I'll do is just to kinda show how how to use this thing. And, you know, like, when I think about agentic AI, this word agentic has sort of lost all meaning because it it's just, like, used so much.
So I I feel like probably a lot of listeners have heard the word agent, but they don't actually know what it means or, you know, they think it's, like, some, like, cool AI or or something. But it it actually has, a very specific meaning in the AI world, which I think has kind of been lost because a lot of the products that people have released in cold agentic in the past are not actually agentic.
And so, like, when you think about the AI products that everyone's used, you know, like, obviously, Cloud Code,
chat based apps where you just chat with app kind of back and forth, send some messages.
The biggest difference with agents is it can take action.
And it's not just text and it's not just like web searching, but it can actually use tools on your computer. It can it can interact with the world.
And so for Anthropic from the very beginning,
since before our models were good, like before like,
you know, like Cloud three or whatever,
this is a thing that we wanted to get really good at because we felt that it's very important.
And so
from the start, wanted our models to be really great at coding and then really great at tool use and then really great at computer use. So it's it's kinda cool like, you know, the last year seeing how people have been hacking quad code, it's pretty obvious this is kind of the place that we should go.
And so for people that have used quad code, you know, none of this will be, you know, like too surprising. These are actually things they can do. So really what we're trying to do is make this something that everyone can use in a way that's safe.
And so what I'm gonna do is
you know, here on my desktop, I have a I have this like receipts folder. I have a few receipts in it.
So I'm just gonna give
co work access to my desktop.
And you you have to pick like which specific folders I can see. By default, they can't see anything. So you have to kind of opt in to see to let it, uh, access specific folders.
And so I'm gonna say,
you um, know, I can say, I have a receipts folder.
Can you rename the files
to match the dates on the receipts?
So so I think one interesting thing is when you're using CoWork, it's really
like,
it's operating with your files. Like, that's a that's a big sort of mindset shift that people should have. It's almost like your operating system. Is that right?
Yeah. Exactly. It's like it it has your files, so the ones that you give it access to.
But actually, the even cooler thing is that it can use all sorts of tools.
And so files actually is like you know, that's like that's useful, but it's not it's not like that cool. What's actually much more interesting is it can generate files for you. So, you know, it can make like presentations and things like this.
It can interact with any tool over MCP,
and it has built in support for Chrome based browsers.
So it can actually control your browser to do to do stuff.
And so I'll I'll kinda show that a little bit. So this is kind of the first step.
When you're first getting started with CoWork, the thing I recommend is, you know, do exactly what I just did. You know, dismount the folder, give CoWork access to it,
and just, like, play around with it. It's it's super useful for cleaning up files, organizing things like that.
And so here, it it found these four receipts that I have.
It's asking me if
one one of the receipts, I guess, is missing a date. So should I just rename the others?
So I'll just say,
know, for one, it's we'll say it's, like, up to you.
And then for two, I'll say,
don't rename it.
And we actually call this
reverse solicitation
in the AI world. So so what this means is when the model is unsure about something, it's gonna ask you for clarification.
And we we've sort of taught the model to be pretty good at this. So instead of assuming
it's unsure about something, it's just gonna ask you.
And so yeah. In this case, so it renamed
the receipts. So I'm just gonna open this up to double check. Yeah. Cool. And so the receipts were named a little bit better organized.
And so maybe what I can try next is
let's, put this in a spreadsheet.
So it takes control of your computer,
basically, in that sense, right, if you allow it to take control?
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And so we put so much work into kind of safety and
making sure that as this happens, you accidentally
shoot yourself in the foot and delete files or whatever.
So there's just a huge amount of work that went into this. And it kind of starts at the model side where, you know, for Anthropic,
from the very beginning,
we were the AI safety lab and not the reason that we exist.
And so there's a lot of work into, like, alignment and mechanistic interpretability and kinda all these ideas to to make sure that the model does what you want in a way that's safe, kind of at the model layer. And this literally means, like, studying the neurons, kind of the same way that you would study
neurons in, you know, like, in a in a human.
And so we you know, you can, like, identify structures,
and you can kinda study in a very scientific way as a black box also
to make sure that it's safe. So this is called alignment.
And then we do a whole bunch of other stuff. So there's actually a whole virtual machine running under the hood, and this is just to make sure that any actions taken are safe and don't affect your broader system.
And then as of last week, there's also deletion protection. So if you accidentally delete something,
then you're gonna get prompted first.
So the model can kinda make sure that that's actually a thing that you wanna do. Obviously, also as we start interacting with the Internet, something like prompt injection is quite scary.
And so we built in a lot of protections against that. Obviously, you know, it's it's not perfect, it's something we're iterating on. But this is also part of the reason that we released this pretty early is we wanna see how people use it. And a big part of making models safe isn't just studying them on a lab, but studying them in the wild
to see how it's useful.
And so this was like pretty cool. Right? So we we have this folder.
First it kinda renamed all all my receipts. I asked it to make a sheet. It just made the spreadsheet, so it's already here.
Maybe I don't want a spreadsheet. Maybe I I want like a Google sheet. So actually
That's so interesting. Right? Because, like, I think
where people stumble with tools like Cowork and Cloud Code is because you can do anything,
making it a of course, that makes sense, making it a Google Sheet.
But, like,
that's where it's so interesting that you can you really can treat it like a teammate in that sense. Right? Like, go and do this thing. The world is your oyster. Woah. What is happening right now?
Yeah. So it's like it's opening the browser.
And so here it's gonna ask you for permission. Just for this demo, gonna say always allow for the site. But you can just say allow
once or deny.
And so Quad's taken the wheel.
It's making a spreadsheet for me.
This is gonna sort of take a while. And so this is one of the things that we're iterating on is making this kind of computer use a lot faster.
I I remember
man, this is when I first joined Anthropic and this was maybe
this is like Sonnet 3.6 or I forgot what the what we called it, like Sonnet 3.5 new.
And that was the first model that I think we really started to crack computers. And I remember I was sitting with my team
and there was literally a researcher that ran into the room in the movies and was like, oh my god, Quad knows how to use computers.
And
we just had to order a pizza and
it picked a pineapple pizza and then ordered it and it asked us for a credit card. And then we we got that delivered to the office. But it was tedious. It took like an hour or something for it to click around.
And since then, we've been improving the model's ability to use a computer.
And so you can kinda see that here. So here the, you know, Quad is typing and it's interacting with the spreadsheet.
And it can see what's on the screen. It can interact with it. Anything that's in your browser, it it can just use.
And could it use,
like, email
know, let's say we wanted to send this to somebody, you know, finance team. Like, can you maybe we'll get into it later, but, you know, with things like connections and MCPs,
is that possible?
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Okay. So let's, like, let's make this, like, kind of a nice spreadsheet because we don't wanna send, like, a badly formatted spreadsheet to our coworker.
But
let's make it nice, and then we can ask Claude to send it. And so here it's kinda cool. It's, like, you know, it's it's still early days and so there's some, like, formatting mistakes. It didn't paste it exactly correctly,
but it noticed it. So notice that, you know, it's not actually split correctly,
and so now it's trying to format it.
So kinda notice this.
And, yeah, Greg, like, to your point, it's funny. These, like, these use cases and the way that people are gonna use these tools, like I said at the start, it's gonna be so surprising.
I'm just so excited to see how people use it. And sort of the crazy thing about them is they're so general purpose.
It's like it's sort of like a computer itself or like the Internet or something. Like like you said, like, when when you first, like, had an iPhone, like, you would never have predicted that, you know, there would be an Uber app at some point. But, you know, that's that's what happened.
And I sort of feel like we're at the beginning of that, but for for agents.
Yeah. I think
it it it's it sounds so obvious in hindsight.
Like, of course, you have a phone with GPS.
Of course. Right? You're gonna you're gonna have things like Uber and DoorDash and stuff like that.
But
I feel like, yes, you're right. I think, like, what I'm trying to figure out in my mind like, I'm watching this and I'm like, this is really cool, but I'm thinking about, like, okay.
You know, how do I audit, like, my entire company?
Like, what are all the tasks that the company is doing? How are they interacting with files?
And how are they using the Internet?
And how are they sending things?
And then what are opportunities I can use to, like, make my team and also my life more productive. That's what's going through my head right now. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. That's a great way to think about it.
And by the way, something that's kinda cool is, you know, as this is running, I'm just gonna make a new task and do something else.
So, you know, what are
some cool episodes
of startup?
Cool. So while while this one's running, we can, like, we can let this one go too. And I I often have a bunch of tasks running in parallel too.
But, yeah, that's exactly it. It's like you should just think about, like, what what's all, like, the tedious stuff that you do every day? And you can just throw all of this stuff to co work.
And I I feel like this happened for coding over the last year because, of course, engineers and programmers
are the earliest adopters.
So when the tooling first became able to do that kind of work, engineers adopted it first. But
now now this is coming
now this is possible for everyone else to use too. So that's super exciting. And when we talk to engineers about the way they like to use quad code, they run a bunch of quads in parallel. They use it to automate the tedious stuff. And I don't know, man. Like, for me, this is just the most fun I've ever had as an engineer because I get to do the stuff that I enjoy and I just feel so productive because quad does all the, you know, the stuff that I didn't wanna do.
Okay. So now now we have this, like, we have the spreadsheet. This looks alright. It's not too bad.
The data looks correct.
You know, one thing that's missing though is
well, we we can add maybe like the totals, but I think for the sake of the demo,
what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna see if it can email it.
So just reading for audio listeners. Can you open Gmail and send the sheet to Amy?
And
wow.
Yeah. So I'm gonna say always continue.
So how is it gonna know
it's Amy. Right? It's gonna pull up the contacts within
Gmail?
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. That that's exactly it. It's gonna interact with it the same way that,
you know, anyone else would interact with a computer.
And it's the same thing. It can it can, like, click stuff. It can read the screen.
Okay. So compose window open. Let me type Amy. So you have, like, multiple when you're when you're, like, locked in, so to speak, you're kinda you have multiple of these windows open at or multiple virtual
machines open at at the same time.
Yeah. Yeah. I usually have a bunch of these, you know, like five or five or 10 or whatever.
And so we can see the models, you know, trying to interact with this.
And so it filled out Amy.
And you know, by the way, just so because this is, you know, going on YouTube, you know you're gonna have some haters in the comments, so we're just gonna address them right now.
Someone in the comments is gonna be like, but that's so slow. I can do it faster myself or something.
What is your reaction?
Of course you can. Yeah.
Could definitely do this much faster. And it's actually the same thing for a lot of quad code. Right? Like, especially at the beginning, I I could do it much faster.
But but I think sort of two things happen.
One is that
the model just gets better at doing it quickly, and this is just something you would I I would expect over time.
But then the second thing is because you can do multiple things in parallel, it's actually a big time saver. And so usually my workflow is I'll kick off like a few different tasks in parallel,
and I'll just kinda like go back and forth between them and kinda tend to my quads,
make sure they're in a good place, see if they have any questions or anything like that. So it's really a different kind of workflow. Like, I feel like now is the age of like kinda multi
multi clotting, of of parallelism,
of like not going super deep on stuff, but kinda being more of a generalist and more tending tending to your clots.
And so this was this other chat that we kicked off earlier.
And in this case, it sort of did some research,
so that's pretty cool. So it didn't just go to, you know, like startup ideas podcast website, but it searched the Internet, checked a bunch of different places, checked like someone's notes about it. Yeah. Ten ten rules for for quad code. Yeah. I'll find that interesting too.
And
let's see. So it seems like this is
the email is probably all drafted.
The draft has been saved. Yep. Please send.
And I also use this for, like, Slack too. Like, a pretty common use case I've been doing maybe a couple times a week is I have a spreadsheet where we track all the team's work for the month or for the week or whatever.
And instead of having to bug everyone on the team to fill out the status, what I do is I ask co work to look at the spreadsheet. Any column that's not filled out, just message the engineer on Slack.
And it does that really well. So, you know, I I just ask it to do that, and then I go get a coffee, and I I don't have to do that anymore.
Do you think that co work is gonna be the gateway drug to Claude Code? Because for a lot of beginners, nontechnical people, Claude Code feels a bit overwhelming. But when I'm when I'm watching you do this, this feels,
you know, approachable.
Yeah. I I mean, I think it's, like, probably two kinds of users.
Well, and and it's also it's funny.
QuadCode is built originally in a terminal.
And nowadays
it's available in the Quad mobile app. It's available on the website,
in the IDE, on Slack, on GitHub. So nowadays it's available everywhere, but originally it was built in a terminal.
And I never thought that most engineers would want to use a terminal. Because, you know, it's scary. It's like this thing that's sort of hidden away on the computer. Like, you know, only the most hardcore engineers want to actually work in a terminal day in and day out.
And so it's surprising to me that most engineers wanted to use it. What's even more surprising is a lot of non engineers started to use it, and that was the craziest thing. And, you know, looking at, like, the sales team at Anthropic, like the GTM team, half of them use quad code every week.
And looking at other nontechnical
people at Anthropic, like designers,
product managers, data scientists, pretty much all of them use quad code every day.
So that that's been like pretty surprising.
But my hypothesis
is what they would prefer is actually something a little bit more like this,
where you don't have to deal with a terminal and all that kind of thing. You have a you have an nice UI
because you don't need access to bash and all that kind of stuff because the the model will just do it for you.
Yeah. I think what I would love with something like this is,
you know, automating some of these processes. It's like instead of doing one offs, it's like, anytime this happens, I want you to do this.
That
that's my dream.
Yeah. It's a cool idea. I'm I'm excited to see, like, how it's tied into skills also. I think it's something we're we're thinking about. We haven't quite figured out yet.
Yeah. Because like a skill, what what is it? It's essentially kind of a repeatable way to do something. And so you saw that a little bit earlier up in this conversation
where
when Quad was generating the spreadsheet.
I don't know if you saw it, but it actually loaded the skill. And so we prepackaged the skill for Excel and that's the way that Quad knows how to do it.
And so if you have some weird file format, don't know, if you work with AutoCAD
or if you work with
Salesforce, whatever
it is, the tool
that you use, just make a skill and then Claude can can do it for you.
That's interesting. So
if you have more skills,
co work,
and you're asking it, you know, to do things related to those skills, co work is more likely to use those skills. So you might be able to get a
better outcome out of co work if you,
you know, do some upfront work to actually create some skills.
I think so.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah. I think I think that's exactly right.
Yeah. Okay. Well, that's good to know. And and, you know,
what else do we need to know about co work? Because I know there's,
you know, there's, you know, extensions,
there's there's skills. Like, walk us through some of is there anything else that, you know, we need to know
in order to get the most out of of the product?
You know, we we try to build core work just to be pretty simple.
When we think about the different audiences we serve, for an audience like engineers,
they don't actually like simple. Simple is is good by default, but engineers love to hack their tools. They love to customize their tools.
So that's actually really important. So quad code is just like the most customizable coding agent. It has just like so many extension points. There's like there's skills. There's custom agents.
There there's hooks.
There's an insane amount of configuration and settings that you can set. You know, there there's a a very sophisticated permission system. So there's all sorts of ways to customize it. And this is because we know every engineer works different, and everyone has different preferences.
Everyone uses a different tech stack. Everyone uses a different editor. Everyone use a different OS.
We So wanted to make sure it's really customizable.
For some of my co work, I think we're kinda starting in the opposite direction
and just keep it really simple at the start.
And so if you use co work, I would probably not customize too much. Like, if you have co work installed and you install the Chrome extension, that's pretty much all you need and it'll do everything else for you.
I think over time as you find yourself using maybe software that Core Work is not great at, like, that's the point to think about writing skills.
But that wouldn't be my starting point. Just start simple.
See how it works, see what's useful.
And I think also the other thing, it's just it's so early.
This feels to me a lot like Quad Code a year ago
where we released it before it was early. It was not very good yet. It was super buggy.
It kinda barely worked. The model was not very good at coding a year ago.
And it kinda feels like that to me,
but
I think Corework is actually a little bit better than QuadCode was when we first released it because it's actually useful. And it's already a thing that I use every day.
And,
yeah, I think in the first week, we've we've seen so much more growth. It's it's been like a multiple of the growth that we saw with QuadCode the first week.
So that that's very exciting. It it seems like this is something that people are already finding useful.
You know, we're recording this, what is it, January
2026.
If we if we come back here in twelve months, it's January
2027,
how do you think people are gonna be using Cowork? You know? I know you don't have a crystal ball exactly, but what sort of use cases, and and what is what does the product look like? Like, describe the world in January 2027 with with co work.
Oh, jeez, Greg. I I plan in, a one week timeline.
The
model is just changing so fast. It's it's so hard. And I just feel like, you know, like, the model is it's it's advancing exponentially and just, my puny
human meat brain, like, can't grapple with exponential. It's like we think in linear. And
so I think this kind of exponential is just very, very difficult to plan around.
Okay. But if if I had to speculate,
a year ago,
I made
and I think Dario also made this prediction that by the end of the year, people wouldn't be writing code anymore. And I think that was like sometime mid
last
year or something.
I code every day. I ship 200, 300 PRs every month or something like that.
And in the last two months,
Quad Code has written a 100% of my code. I haven't written a single line by hand. And this is something like I also predicted this way
back middle of last year.
It was sort of not intuitive
because
if you just think about kind of the experience at the time and you trace it linearly,
there's just no way that the model would be at that point. So you really have to kind of believe an exponential
and just literally like plot it out and kind of follow the way that the line the line goes. That's the only way that you would have predicted this. And it was just it was absolutely right. And so I think for coding, this is a work this is something that we're gonna start to see in more and more places for more and more kinds of code that the model is able to just do all of it.
And when we think about co work, I think it's
somewhat similar. I think it's a little bit earlier.
And I think what we're gonna see is for all this kind of tedious tasks like
connecting
app a and b or kind of shuffling data back and forth or whatever,
the model is just gonna be able to do it. And it's gonna get increasingly good at it.
This is I think in some ways it's a little scary.
And in some ways I think it's really exciting because
you don't have to spend your time on this toil some work anymore. You can just focus on the work that you enjoy.
And also everyone, I think, just becomes much much more productive because you have an army of plots that that can do this.
Okay. I like that feature. I like that feature a lot. It's a hard question. I it's a hard question
when you it's sort of like the genie's out of the bottle, and it's hard to predict, like, where the genie's gonna go. So I believe that
co
coworker is the gateway drug to clot code. I think that
people are going to
start using it, and
they're gonna develop, like, vertical use cases,
like, for whatever it is their business is. Like, you mentioned AutoCAD.
Like, you probably weren't thinking about AutoCAD when you were dev helping develop Cobalt
Cowork.
So I think there's gonna be, like, these verticals,
um, and I think
I think that
Cowork is gonna be similar to, like, vertical job boards where
there's very specific roles that you can hire to people. And I do think that there's gonna be this
combination between skills
and these, like, digital teammates that you're gonna, quote unquote, hire.
Yeah. That's that's super interesting. Maybe we should make a bet and just see where it pans out in the year. But, you know, I I have no idea.
But
it's it's definitely interesting to speculate because I I I just feel like the way this technology goes is so different than past technology waves.
It's sort of similar to the Internet. It's sort of similar to computers,
you know, like maybe like telephones or something before that, but the speed is just so much faster.
And because it's kind of piggybacking on all of this, like, the Internet could not exist without telephones
telephones and kind of like phone lines being everywhere. You couldn't have dial up without it. You know, mobile phones couldn't exist without the Internet existing.
So it's sort of like every layer of the stack, it just gets more and more powerful and it spreads more quickly. And so it's like on the back of all of this that AI can exist.
And, yeah, it's it's just gonna be very exciting to see to see where it goes.
I wanna shift gears just for the last ten minutes
because we mentioned Claude Code.
You had a you had a post that went absolutely
viral. I think you know what post I'm gonna talk about. 99,000
bookmarks,
which is crazy.
And I'm gonna share my screen.
I wanna go over it a little bit. This is me learning to use Twitter.
I think I made an account, like, a decade ago, and I haven't really used it. So It's funny. Yeah. It's been fun to learn. You have, like, just a few tweets, but, like, this, you know, this one, you figured it out. You say, I'm Boris. I created Cloud Code. Lots of people have asked for how I use Cloud Code, so I want to show
off my setup a bit. My setup might be surprisingly vanilla. Cloud Code works great out of the box, so I personally don't customize it much. There's not no one correct there's no one correct way to use Cloud Code. We intentionally built it in a way that you can use it, customize it, and hack it however you'd like. Each person on the Cloud Code team use it very differently, so here it goes.
Could you just talk about
some of the just expand on some of these and and what you were saying, you know, what you were saying on here? Because I thought it was really interesting.
Yeah. I'd love to. So this first one, it's very similar to what I was showing in co work where my job now isn't to go super deep on one task. It's to do a bunch of tasks in parallel.
And so, you know, in the when I'm working on quad code, I I usually work in a terminal or on the mobile app. These are kind of the two services I use the most. But like I said, everyone on the team is different. Every user prefers something different, so we build all of these.
And so usually what I do is I'll sort a task in kinda one tab. And once Claude is thinking about it and starting to work on a plan, I'll move on to the second tab. And I'll ask it to make a plan for the second thing. Then I'll move on to the third one, ask it to make a plan. And then finally, like, when,
you know, I've run out of immediate tasks to do, I'll go back to the first tab.
I'll see if the plan looks good. I might go back and forth a little bit. And then once the plan looks good, I usually go into just auto accept edits right away.
Because I think with Opus 4.5, once the plan is good, the model can just execute it pretty much perfectly. This is definitely not the case with previous models.
And so I think there was a lot of excitement about OPUS port 4.5 in
you know, over the last couple months, and I I I think this is kind of one of the big reasons. It's just gotten very good at coding, but also excellent at planning. So once the plan is good, the code is good. And so, yeah, my my work now is just jumping between tabs, kinda tending to the quads, make sure they're unblocked, answering their questions.
With co work, I think I think it's actually quite similar now.
I like that. I'm gonna I'm gonna quote you on that. Once the plan is good, the code is good. Because that's so true. Right? Because if you nail the plan,
the code should,
you know the agents should do the work.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think, like, sometime last year, there was all this buzz about spec driven development.
Yeah. And it just feels like it feels a little too QT and a little too rigid to me. But I think this is sort of a form of spec driven development.
It's like there there is some kind of spec. I think it's just like a plan. That's all it has to be. It's just a text file. It doesn't have to be in a particular format. Once you have that, you're good. Number two, you say, I also run five to 10 clods
in in parallel with my local clods. As I code in my terminal, I will often hand off local sessions to web using and or manually kick off sessions in Chrome, and sometimes I will teleport back and forth. I also start a few sessions from my phone, obviously, from cloud iOS app, Picatu, every morning and throughout the day and check-in on them later. What do you mean by that? This morning, I kicked off, I think, like, three claws as soon as I woke up.
I just had, like, some thought in the morning about, well, maybe I should, like, build this thing or fix this bug or whatever. I was, like, checking Twitter and someone had a bug report.
So I just opened my phone and, you know, in the Quad app, you on on the left side, you click the little menu and there's a code tab. So you can just, like, access Quad code there.
That's what I use for a lot of my code. And it's funny. I I never would have guessed that this is the way that I code.
If you asked me a year ago, I would never have predicted that the way I code now is, like, probably half of it is just on my phone and that it sort of just works.
And then web is kind of the other part. So once I've run out of tabs because it's just like, you know, it's kinda a pain to manage a bunch of different git checkouts because in each tab in my terminal, I actually have a totally separate git checkout. And I don't really use WorkTrees or anything like that. I just keep it pretty simple.
And in web, if I if I just ran out of terminal tabs, I'll just start, like, overflowing to web and and starting tasks there.
Beautiful. So, yeah, I also I so recommending
use iOS,
use web, open multiple,
like, that's what that's you'll get the most out of it that way.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And we have a Android app now too. So, yeah, just like use the mobile app and see how far that can take you.
If it's not giving you good results, also make sure that you tune the environment setup and make sure that you invest in your quad dot m d. That's super duper important.
And I talk about that in number four also.
Mhmm.
Number three, say, I use Opus 4.5 with Thinking for Everything. It's the best coding model I've ever used. And even though it's bigger and slower than Sonnet,
since you have to steer it less
and it's better at tool use. It's almost always faster than using a smaller model in the end.
And cheaper. It's sort of counterintuitive and I had to explain this to people a few times.
But because the model is smarter, it actually uses less tokens in the end.
And it uses so many less tokens,
it's often cheaper
than using a smaller, less intelligent model even though the per token cost for that model is lower. A little counterintuitive, but, yeah, just use the smartest thing if you can. Well, we appreciate that. You know? We appreciate that.
Number four, our team shares a single Claude MD for the Claude code repo.
We check it into git. The whole team contributes multiple times a week. Anytime we see Claude do something incorrectly, we add it to the MD so Claude knows not to do it next time. Other teams maintain their own Claude MDs.
It is each team's job to keep theirs up to date.
And the QuadMD is just a text file, so there's no special format. People ask this all the time. Is there some special format that it has to be in it? No. It's just like it's just a text file, so you can put whatever you want in it. This is a screenshot of our QuadMD. This is literally it. So just really simple. And, you know, you you could format this kinda however you want.
Love it. And then finally, I think yeah. Number five. Oh, no. You have a you got a few more. So
number five, during code review, I'll often tag
at dot claud on my coworker's PRs to add something to the CloudMD as part of the PR.
We use the claud code GitHub action
for this. It's our version of Dan Chipper's compounding engineering.
What what do you mean? What is compound engineering?
Yeah. Oh my god. So there's actually like two bugs in this tweet.
I think I think Dan actually calls it compound engineering, not compounding engineering.
And then the at dot quad, this is me learning how to use x.
But it it's actually at quad. There's there's no dot. I just didn't I think there's like an actual user or whose name is Claude. I I didn't wanna tag them.
But yeah. So so what you do is in Claude code, you run this slash command slash install GitHub action.
And what this does is it installs the Claude app in your GitHub repo.
And what that lets you do is you can then at mention Claude whenever you want and just have it make changes.
And it can just work on PR. So it'll push back to your branch and it'll push the changes right back.
You can also tag it on issues. You can tag it kind of wherever.
I do this multiple times a day. It's it's really, really useful.
I think one of the most common use cases is just like little fixes.
I think the other one is updating the QuadMD
to keep the knowledge base up to date. And, you know, you should never have to comment about something twice.
Back when I was at Meta, something that I did is
this is like in a in a previous life, a previous job. Something that I did is every code review that I did, I would keep a spreadsheet
of all the issues that came up. And whenever the same kind of issue came up again, I would just like tally it up in the spreadsheet. And whenever something hit, I think, like five or 10 tallys or something,
I would write a lint rule. And what that is is it's a way to automate that part of the code review so I don't have to comment about it again. And that was back in the days before LEMS and before the model was any good at coding. And so this is the equivalent nowadays. You just tag Claude, and you have it update your QuadMD, which is your team's knowledge base.
So really simple. And what this means is you don't have to point anything out twice.
I'm curious to see what this looks like for co work. I don't think we figured that out yet. But definitely for quad code, quad m d is kind of the this is the one the one thing that you should all be updating all the time.
Love it.
Number six,
most sessions start in plan mode. If my goal is to write a pull request, I will use plan mode and go back and forth with Claude until I like its plan.
From there, I switch into auto accept
edit edits mode, and Cloud can usually one shot it. A good plan is really important.
Yeah. Like I said, planning is just the most underused feature in Cloud Code. Actually, lot of people use it, but I I would say it's still underused.
I use it for almost all my sessions.
Yeah.
It's
it's a no brainer. So if you aren't already doing this, please do.
Do we we've got
you know, we're not gonna have time to do all of them. What are the I don't think because you have a hard stop. Do you wanna pick one or two to end with?
Yeah. Let's do
this would maybe number 13.
Yeah. Number 13, I think this is probably in addition to using Opus four when people ask about how to get better performance out of quad code,
there's three things that I recommend almost every time.
Number one is use Opus 4.5 with thinking always.
Don't try to use a different model because Opus will just give you better results and more efficiency overall.
The second thing is make sure you have a good QuadMD. And then the third thing is this this tip number 13,
which is give Quad a way to verify its output. And so we we just kinda saw with CoWork how good Quad is at using the Chrome extension in order to write email and in order to work with Sheets.
And it's exactly the same thing. If I'm building an app, I always use the Chrome extension to have Quad test its own work.
And if Quad can verify its own output,
the result is gonna be way way better.
And it's sort of like
imagine that you're a painter and
you make paintings and they have to be pretty good. They have to be maybe even photorealistic
or something or just some kind of very detailed style.
And
you you have to wear a blindfold. You're just not gonna be that good. It's not gonna come out that great. Or it's the same thing for an engineer. Like, if you have to write code but you can never run the code or you can never see the output and you can never see the website. It's just not gonna be good. And so it's the same thing with Quad.
As the model gets more intelligent, that first shot is gonna get better and better.
But really, you wanna give it a way to verify the output,
and it'll be much better. So this is like running tests if you're an engineer,
starting a server also if you're an engineer, or, you know, seeing seeing the output in a simulator or in a browser.
Amazing.
And the ultimate tip, I guess, is just get your hands dirty. Right?
That's it. Yeah. I mean, there's no right there's no one right way to use the stuff. Like, you know, see see what's useful, see what's not, find your own workflows.
It's sort of a I I heard someone describing QuadCode as like a find your own path
book. You know, like one of those books where you have to like, do you do do you go to the dungeon or do you explore the forest?
Like this kind of thing. Or or like a like an old RPG
video game. It's just kinda like that. It's like it's very free form. There's no one right way to do it. So just see what works for you. Boris, I appreciate you taking the time, the generosity to spill the sauce and just to to share with us
how we can get the most out of both
Cowork and Claude Code.
Everyone's thinking about it, everyone's trying to especially on this podcast, you know, the Start Up Ideas podcast, you have millions of people who are trying to figure out how I can be more productive and how I can build businesses around some of these things. So thank you.
Thank you for the time.
I'll include links on where to follow Boris. He doesn't tweet a lot, but when he tweets, it's it's worth paying attention to.
And I just have I wanna leave with one thing just because my audience would kill me if I didn't ask this.
So as you know, Boris, I'm from French Canada.
And we speak French, obviously, in French Canada. And
I call Claude
Claude.
Am I the only one?
Oh, man. You're probably not the only one. A of the a lot of the world speaks French. Which one sounds better?
What what feels I mean, me,
Claude sounds better. It's like Jean Claude Van Damme, even though people would say Jean Claude Van Damme. It's like,
that's my take. That's my hot take. To me, it sounds better. You know, Greg, I'm I'm gonna today around the office, I'm just gonna call it Claude, we'll we'll see what people say. I'll I'll report back. Okay. Report back. Alright. Sounds good. Boris, thanks again for coming on,
and I'll see you next time. Yeah. Thanks so much, Craig.