alt Hacker NewsClaude Cowork and chat are now one Claude
Comments
How did this new account `vertigoruntime` get three posts on the front page, all in the last day?
- This post
- The DeepMind Institute https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727659
- Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49723408
based on their account submission history they have a 25% hit rate (!) Seems very, very weird.
People keep asking for this w/ Codex, too, and I really regret that both labs seem inclined to listen.
If you ask a thinking/research type question in 'Chat' versus 'Work' mode in these products -- say, something complex about politics, or do a multiturn business strategy, or want to work thru a new concept, you get very different answers.
The harness, steering, etc. in the chat/reasoning products is so much better for this type of question (that doesn't require code as a primary substrate).
Even as someone who mainlines like, 7 coding agents at all times, I regret that productivity fever will mean the regression of think-first-act-later AI UX.
These kinds of updates always have this romantic scenario of someone having Claude develop a presentation or something on their way to work between multiple devices, which actually feels a little sad and does not align with what happens in my life at all.
Hi, this is my team! Happy to answer any questions.
There's a lot in this launch, but the core idea is to simplify the product while giving users access to more capabilities. You no longer need to know ahead of time how much work a conversation might involve. If you're at your computer, Claude can use your local files and apps. If you close your laptop, Claude can keep working on its own computer.
This launch also lets you use Claude Design, Claude Docs, and Claude Slides directly from conversations. That's possible because we made Artifacts much more powerful: whenever Claude makes you an app, website, design system, or anything else, it can deploy an artifact with multiplayer features and databases.
As many of you probably know from your own work, giving users more power while making the experience simpler is really, really hard. It took many iterations to get to this version. We're far from done, but I expect people will be able to do much more while having to think about it less.
Most normal users have no idea whether to choose chat or cowork. This makes sense for 95% of customers.
Nobody really knows how to product-ize any of these LLM interfaces beyond just chat.
They don't want a traditional UI with buttons and forms and labels because they want the interface to be "chat". The problem is that "chat" is tedious. And the turn-based, linear nature of the chat interaction model makes it even more tedious and unproductive.
To Anthropic: I hope you don't merge Claude Code and chat, I like keeping their memory separate.
I'm starting to explore alternative options because Claude has become an awful value proposition. Any suggestions?
Basically DOA in healthcare, even with a BAA I don't want Claude Cowork enabled in our workstations, ever.
Really excited to try the gsuite replacements, which seems like the bigger announcement than the title suggest
I really appreciated that the users that I administrate had an option where Claude was not going to get carried away and orchestrate workslop, I will have to completely re-write my usage guides after testing how prompts are routed now.
Feels like the same "let us do _all_ of the thinking for you" messaging that Microsoft has with Copilot.
I hope this doesn’t get confusing like ChatGPT made it.
I feel like Claude has some of the best UX, and hope this doesn’t dilute the experience.
That's the natural outcome. AI will eventually collapse into a single, universal entry point, much like Google Search became the default gateway for the web.
Is there a mature centralized platform, self hosted, that sync all your “AI stuff” across multiple devices? So regardless of the harness, it sync the api keys, providers, skills, and seasons for starters with other authenticated machines? Say you used codex on macos_1 through this platform, and later you used opencode on linux_3, it syncs everything to the new machine, no ssh to centralized machine, no git, none of that duct tape solutions, which they work but cumbersome.
They could have figured that out before launching Cowork to everyone.
Less is more. Thanks.
I love this
Claude's mobile app wouldn't show any Cowork initiated conversations, even if those conversations didn't leverage cowork specific features
It's funny how they keep trying to add more interfaces and everything keeps coming back to chat. And of course it would, natural language is the simplest interface there is. Anything they add beyond chat, that isn't placed within chat, that isn't some artifact of chat, is friction.
[flagged]
A change for the better. The distinction made it unnecessarily complex for users. The ChatGPT desktop app inherited the same separation. Having to change between ChatGPT for day to day questions, to Codex for everything else always seemed too cumbersome.
The problem is that knowledge workers just need the simplest way possible to automate their work. Currently I feel like Anthro is overcomplicating this. If I'm an accountant, I want to open Claude App, describe my workflow for balancing some books, then have Claude design a reusable WORKFLOW that it runs whenever I ask. The workflow only needs 2 primitive skills to do anything: /work, and /review. Compose these together with guidance docs into workflows, then workflows and call other workflows. It's all just callable skills.
/balance-books hey claude here's the books. Go balance them
Claude then uses the guidance docs and various subagents to review the books, send off parallel workers with cheap models, then review with a more expensive model. Done in the repeatable, correct order with independent review every time. As new models come out, your workflow structure stays the same. You just delete some prescription from the guidance docs.
https://github.com/DanMcInerney/orchflows