Claude Cowork and chat merge into one Claude

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.

Good to see AI providers finally starts understanding how bad was the user experience. This is not just a Claude issue but same issue exists in ChatGPT.

While it is in the right direction, there is more to be done. I personally think that they should separate Chat and Coding into two separate apps. Both are completely different use-cases. As a developer, I have need for both but I don't like them in the same app. For example, I consider my chats as knowledge base like Obsidian that I want to keep it organized and browse in the future. On the other hand, once I done a coding task, I don't really need that chat anymore. Having coding tasks in the app feel like polluting my regular chats. This frustration led me build my own Chat-only App https://www.vinaa.ai/ where I keep my regular chats in one place organised into projects and folders incl. the ability to auto-organise chats. App is still in early days and I am experimenting a lot to make it a real AI knowledgebase.

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.

Just yesterday I experienced this product weirdness -- oh you're in a chat in this project and I can't do that, you need to open a task.

The product management at Anthropic is pretty... nonexistent?

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.