I don't use a Mac so can't run Cowork, but the normal Claude CLI is pretty good at general automation tasks (as is Codex-CLI and Gemini CLI.)

Most recent example: I wanted to try out GLM-image when it dropped the other day, but didn't feel like spending an hour dealing with multifile, multidirectory HuggingFace downloads and all the usual Python dependency headaches. So I made an empty directory, ran Claude Code, and told it "Please download all files from https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-Image/tree/main into this directory and test the model." An hour later, I tabbed back to the console window and there was the sample image file.

Looking at the transcript, sure enough, it ran into all the usual headaches and hassles... but the difference is I didn't have to deal with them.

Note that I didn't tell it "Use uv to test the model" -- I just YOLOed it with my system Python installation. If I later find that it broke something else, oh, well... that sounds like a job for Claude, too.

Another thing that's nice about these CLI tools is that they hide the differences between terminals pretty effectively. I ran this particular task in a Windows DOS box, but could just as easily have used PowerShell, a Mac, or a Linux terminal. The idea of not having to care what OS I'm running is an alluring one, given the steady enshittification of Windows.