In Just 10 Days, Anthropic Built Cowork Enitrely Written by Claude Code

Anthropic has announced Cowork, a new autonomous AI agent built on Claude, designed to extend Claude’s capabilities beyond chat and coding into general knowledge work.

Cowork is positioned as “Claude Code for the rest of your work.” While Claude Code is primarily used by developers, Cowork is designed for anyone who wants Claude to independently plan and execute multi-step tasks with minimal supervision.

Unlike a regular chat interface, Cowork gives Claude ongoing access to a user-selected folder on their computer. With that access, Claude can plan work, carry it out step by step, and update files directly—looping the user in as it progresses rather than requiring constant prompts.

As examples, Anthropic says Cowork can reorganise a cluttered downloads folder, extract expenses from screenshots into a spreadsheet, or produce a first draft of a report from scattered notes. 

Lenny Rachitsky, host of Lenny’s Podcast, said that Claude Code was able to access a folder with 320 transcripts of his podcast episodes, and pull out ten important themes, and counterintuitive truths that guests in his podcast say — and Cowork completed the task successfully.

It can also analyse locally stored meeting transcripts to answer questions, generate summaries, or prepare notes. When paired with calendar data, Cowork can create documents or reports tied to upcoming meetings and events.

Cowork can also use Claude’s existing connectors, which link it to external services and information sources. Anthropic says Cowork adds an initial set of skills that improve Claude’s ability to create files such as documents and presentations. 

When paired with Claude in Chrome, Cowork can also complete tasks that require browser access.

According to Anthropic engineer Felix Rieseberg, Cowork was built in just 1.5 weeks. In a separate post on X, engineer Boris Cherny said that all of the product’s code was written by Claude Code.

Cowork is available as a research preview in the macOS app for Claude Max subscribers

While many early reactions praised Cowork as a much-needed agentic tool, one detailed review raised concerns about its user experience and target audience. Claire Vo, founder of ChatPRD, said, “I tried a few tasks on Cowork, and I'd say the outputs were [okay].”

Vo said Cowork exposes too much of its internal process for non-technical users, while also limiting flexibility for more advanced ones. Despite these issues, she noted that Cowork produced better results than standard chat. 

Her conclusion was that Cowork currently sits in an awkward middle ground and will need to clearly commit to a specific user group to scale.