Anthropic's agentic tool Claude Code has been a huge hit with some software developers and hobbyists, and now the company is bringing that modality to more general office work with a new feature called Cowork.
Built on the same foundation as Claude Code and embedded into the macOS Claude desktop app, Cowork allows users to give Claude access to a specific folder on their computer and then provide clear language instructions for tasks.
Anthropic gave examples such as filling out an expense report from a folder full of photos of receipts, writing reports from a large stack of digital notes, or reorganizing a folder (or cleaning up your desktop) based on a prompt.
A sample demo of Cowork in action
Much of this was already possible with Claude Code, but it may not have been clear to all users that it could be used that way, and Claude Code required more technical knowledge to set it up. Anthropic's goal with Cowork is to make it something that every knowledge worker – from developers to marketers – can get started with right away. Anthropic says it started working on Cowork in part because people were already using Claude Code for general knowledge work tasks.
I've already done similar things with the Claude desktop app via Model Context Protocol (MCP)which makes it perform tasks like taking notes directly in my Obsidian vault from the files I've shown, but this is clearly a cleaner way to do some of that – and there are Claude Code-like usability benefits here, such as the ability to submit new requests or changes to the command with a new message before the first task has completed.
