You should check out Claude Cowork

It's a glimpse into the unevenly-distributed future that's already here.

It’s been a little while since I published one of these newsletters. What inspired me to come back?

Claude Cowork.

If you haven’t hard about this new tool from Anthropic here it is in a nutshell: it’s a semi-autonomous digital coworker that lives inside your computer.

You can read the details from Anthropic directly.

This is not just another chatbot, or an incremental improvement to an existing one. It’s a little glimpse into the unevenly-distributed future that’s already here.

So as not to over-hype Cowork specifically, it’s a “research preview”. It’s still early days. There’s an infinite number of things it cannot do, or cannot do well. It’s not AGI, whatever that means.

But it’s nonetheless very powerful, and it is one more data point to help illustrate the story of how AI is impacting work.

In broad strokes, you assign a folder to share with Cowork, and all the files related to its task go in there. These include reference files you start with, and also files that Cowork will create along the way. Then you give some instructions. Cowork asks for clarification as needed, and then goes ahead to plan and execute the work you’ve delegated.

Cowork can perform complex multi-step tasks, check its own work, and make revisions as necessary before ever presenting you with a deliverable.

I recently tasked Cowork with making a responsive web-based viewer for large format construction drawings. I gave Cowork the original PDF file and instructions. It was able to view the drawings, understand the logic of how the various sheets related to one another, and create an interactive website in minutes.

When I asked it to pull out individual details from the drawings so they could be linked to directly, it went through an exercise of cropping the specific areas as individual images, but some of the crops were cut off. When I pointed this out, it autonomously checked all the crops and adjusted them as needed. It performed this process recursively until it achieved the desired outcome, only checking in with me when it had completed its work successfully.

This semi-autonomous process is exactly how Claude Cowork itself was made. Anthropic has said that all of the code for Cowork was written by AI itself, using their own agentic Claude Code tool (Cowork is essentially Claude Code made for non-developer folks). Anthropic built and shipped Claude Cowork in about a week and a half, over the holidays.

Having used Replit, which is another agentic AI coding tool, for several months now I can attest to the power of this type of AI application. The ability for the tool to work for extended periods of time, across several steps, checking its own work as it goes is fundamentally different than what most people are used to with AI chatbots (to the extent that most people are used to AI chatbots at all).

...and now this power is coming to common “office work” involving Word docs, spreadsheets, file organization, data analysis, etc. in a way that’s accessible to people with typical office work skillsets.

It will be interesting to see how quickly this kind of tool is adopted and integrated into workflows, or is used to create entirely new workflows. As with most AI tool adoption, I expect there will be a steep curve at the bleeding edge, with a very few people creating outsized value and garnering outsized returns, while a long tail majority are still figuring out ChatGPT fundamentals.