First impressions of Claude Cowork

> Look at my drafts that were started within the last three months and then check that I didn’t publish them on simonwillison.net using a search against content on that site and then suggest the ones that are most close to being ready

This is a very detailed, particular prompt. The type of prompt a programmer would think of as they were trying to break down a task into something that can be implemented. It is so programmer-brained that I come away not convinced that a typical user would be able to write it.

This isn’t an AI skepticism post - the fact that it handles the prompt well is very impressive. But I’m skeptical that the target user is thinking clearly enough to prompt this well.

Author site: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/12/claude-cowork/

I enjoyed hearing Claude Code creator Boris Cherny talk about "latent demand"[0], which is when users start using your product for something it was not intended for. When that happens, it's a great signal that you should go build that into a full product.

Cowork seems like a great application of that principle.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmdLVWMdjOk

This is a nice technical account that we're used to seeing from Simon.

I get a kick out of the fact that Microsoft has been preciously clinging to the "Copilot" branding and here comes Claude coming saying "Cowork? Good enough for us!".

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Taking a step back, I really would love to see a broader perspective -- an account of someone who is not tech savvy at all. Someone who works a basic desk job that requires basic competency of microsoft word. I'm so deep into the bubble of AI-adjacent people that I haven't taken stock of how this would or could empower those who are under-skilled.

We've taken it as truth that those who benefit most from AI are high-skilled augmenters, but do others see some lift from it? I'd love if anthropic tried to strap some barely-performing administrative assistants into these harnesses and see if there's a net benefit. For all I know, it's not inconceivable that there be a `rm -rf` catastrophe every other hour.

Leveraging Claude Code in a Linux shell to do all sorts of stuff has been an amazing superpower for me, and I think for many others. Cowork is a promising next step to democratize this superpower for others.

If Microsoft, in creating their next gen agentic OS, wants to replace Windows with the Linux kernal, Claude Code, and bash shell (turning Windows into a distribution of sorts,) more power to them. However, I doubt this is the direction they'll go.

I worry this is gonna cause even more sensitive/privilaged data extrafiltration than currently is happening. And most “normies” won't even notice.

I know the counterargument is people are already putting in company data via ChatGPT. However, that is a conscious decision. This may happen without people even recognizing that they are “spilling the beans”.

I just used Claude Code to do something that would have taken my wife 3+ days

She has to go through about 100 resumes for a position at her college. Each resume is essentially a form the candidate filled out and lists their detailed academic scores from high school > PhD, their work experience, research and publications.

Based on the declared data, candidates are scored by the system

Now this is India and there's a decent amount of fraud, so an individual has to manually check the claimed experience/scores/publications against reality

A candidate might claim to have relevant experience, but the college might be unaccredited, or the claimed salary might be way too low for a relevant academic position. Or they might claim to have published in XYZ journal, but the journal itself might be a fraudulent pay-to-publish thing

Going through 100+ resumes, each 4 pages long is a nightmare of a task. And boring too.

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So I asked Claude Code to figure out the problem. I gave it a PDF with the scoring guidelines, a sample resume, and asked it to figure out the problem

Without me telling it, it figured out a plan that involved checking a college's accredition and rating (the govt maintains a rating for all colleges), the claimed salary vs actual median salary for that position (too low is a red flag), and whether the claimed publication is in either the SCOPUS index or a govt approved publications index

(I emphasize govt approved because this is in a govt backed institution)

Then I gave it access to a folder with all the 100 resumes.

In less than 30 minutes, it evaluated all candidates and added the evaluation to a CSV file. I asked it to make it more readable, so it made a HTML page with data from all the candidates and red/green/yellow flags about their work-experience, publications, and employment

It made a prioritized list of the most promising candidates based on this data

My wife double checked because she still "doesn't trust AI", but all her verification almost 100% matched Claude's conclusions

This was a 3 day, grinding task done in 30 minutes. And all I did was type into a terminal for 20 minutes

I think Claude Cowork should come with a requirement or a very heavily structured wizard process to ensure the machine has something like a Time Machine backup or other backups that are done regularly, before it is used by folks.

The failure modes are just too rough for most people to think about until it's too late.

This is some low hanging fruit that keeps getting driven by in order to speed up development. There is so so much potential here. If this can replace the RPS consulting industry I won't be unhappy. Let individuals do it themselves so they have time to work themselves into some other position or move up/take on more responsibility.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this guy say anything negative about an AI product, which makes me skeptical of his insights here.

My imagination may be lacking, but what would you realistically use a tool like this for?

One rough edge for me: the cowork interface seems to have turned off “extensions” - my first ask was to read some emails and compare with some local documents and draft a document. It kept trying to use claude chrome to navigate to gmail.

I’m not sure what the plan for integrating extensions is here but they definitely will be wanted.

just in case anyone is interested, I will mention my MIT licensed project that is very useful with Claude https://github.com/runvnc/mindroot