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Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude
- chenster 2mo agoThat'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.
- mohd_rafay 2mo ago[flagged]
- tiffanyh 2mo agoI 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.
- MarkMarine 2mo agoClaude has a jagged UX if you support non-devs. The surfaces before today in the desktop app were: Chat, cowork, Claude code. Inside Claude code you’ve got cloud environments and local. Let’s say as a normal desktop user you wanted to just automate something normal in your work, going to a website (maybe some internal app at your company) getting some data. Depending on what surface you used this will either not work, not work well (cowork), or work quite well but possibly be blocked because of bot controls (local Claude code) or again not work (cloud Claude code) It was nuts. You can clearly tell these were different teams and products mashed into the same app. Super confusing for non technical users. Hopefully it’s a little better today
- tiffanyh 2mo agoDo you think ChatGPT UX is better (after they merged everything recently)? Genuinely curious.
- MarkMarine 2mo agoFor me it’s still jagged, but chatgpt never had the weird “cowork” abstraction with the Linux machine. I don’t talk to non-technical users that use the chatGPT app for work so I’m not sure if that’s been a positive change for them, but I would imagine if that was put in place for Claude it would be better for them. Chat is instant answers, different model, faster; work is more detailed, thinks more, has access to all the tools. This is what I see the users doing, but there is a third mode they use (deep research, exhaustively find me the right answer to a crucial question) that is underserved right now. All of this is moot to me as a dev, I use terminal, herdr, pi… so I don’t see the jagged edges myself. But regular users do
- ChickeNES 2mo agoSounds like they need a "Claude for Normal People" and a "Claude for people who know how computers work" lol
- MarkMarine 2mo agoI would argue they need 1 product owner for the app surface so I can’t see their org structure so clearly. Those jagged edges and users hitting blocks depending on what section of the app they were in are design failures, I know how a computer works and when using the Claude app it wasn’t always clear to me what the right combo of things to press to get my desired outcomes.
- ChickeNES 2mo agoYeah I don't disagree, ChatGPT/Claude both could really stand a UI/UX pass (and a perf pass for Firefox's sake lol). I was more expressing the perennial fear of power user features being jettisoned in favor of the lowest common denominator.
- throwaway2027 2mo agoI'm starting to explore alternative options because Claude has become an awful value proposition. Any suggestions?
- fidotron 2mo agoI turned off Anthropic properly and switched all of that over to OpenAI yesterday. (I use other models for other things too, especially DeepSeek in Pi). Honestly aside from the voice it uses you wouldn't notice a difference. Switching costs are low, vote with your wallet.
- georgeburdell 2mo agoSo you voted for Kodos instead of Kang [1]. Local models are the way out of the rug pulling [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BUAnyVAanac&ra=m https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BUAnyVAanac&ra=m
- fidotron 2mo agoI don't actually disagree, and advocate that for now the thing to do is use both. You need to use frontier models to understand where the puck is going, but also to use local ones for anything remotely sensitive.
- KronisLV 2mo ago> I turned off Anthropic properly and switched all of that over to OpenAI yesterday. Same, just a while longer ago. I much prefer how OpenAI models write to Anthropic's, will probably revisit Anthropic in a generation or two. Context size is more limited, but no critical forgetfulness due to compaction so far, though I also like having plan files around both for future reference and improving chances of success at long form work. Also tried out Kimi K3, was nice but slow (and apparently routed some requests to Claude anyways), GLM 5.3 was faster and still pretty good but the token allowances were kinda limited.
- rfgplk 2mo agoOpenAI is a better value proposition too because they give you effectively infinite image generation + chat usage, which is separate from work/codex.
- leohonexus 2mo agoTo Anthropic: I hope you don't merge Claude Code and chat, I like keeping their memory separate.
- bakies 2mo agoI very intentionally have all memory turned off for chat. The amount of times I want to discuss an approach for it to pull memory out and have that steer the decision making is so obnoxious
- johen8 2mo agoChat, create a new landing page for the company! "Sure! And since you were asking me about lobsters yesterday, I'll make it red and seafood themed!"
- tamimio 2mo agoReminds me few months ago I asked it about a TV model specs, then later I was doing a UI for something, response was “I modified xyz and now should works perfectly with the HDR in your TV model!!”
- varispeed 2mo ago> I like keeping their memory separate. When casually a friend asks you to ask your Claude something about topic you chatted about earlier and then Claude brings back a secret you didn't want anyone to know yet. Yes you can set up a project and then ask a question, but this is tedious.
- mjorgers 2mo agoA 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.
- Sherveen 2mo agoPeople 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.
- Tactical45 2mo agoThe fact that it doesn't work well today doesn't invalidate the user need. Not everyone wants a terminal style interface. Traditional UX makes more sense especially if say you are accessing existing plugins and say kicking off a scheduling task - no way would I want to do that via a chat interface if I have the option.
- sudo_cowsay 2mo agoAgree, and it allows ordinary users to have a taste of both worlds, instead of being like: "eww, what is this black box and why doesn't my mouse work"
- steve1977 2mo agoI sometimes get very different answers if I ask the chat product the same question multiple times.
- firmretention 2mo agoIsn't that expected since LLMs are inherently non-deterministic?
- Zambyte 2mo agoLLMs are chaotic pure functions. Their input is usually randomized.
- royal__ 2mo agoThese 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.
- temp_praneshp 2mo agoweirdly enough, that aligns exactly with my life. Two years ago, I had no commute, and presentations were tedious ( i was NOT a good google slides user ), I kinda prefer this world for now
- kylecazar 2mo ago"Plan a trip to Italy next month and book the flights" I see a version of that all the time and would never, ever do it.
- sudo_cowsay 2mo agoExactly! Imagine if it booked like a 3000 dollar 1st class flight because it thought it was providing you with "the most comfortable and hospitable experience as possible."
- tipsytoad 2mo agoidk I thought the same until I got personal amex support at work, now it’s my roofline on how useful/trusted an agent could be. Now I book all my travel through them, and it’s an absolute blessing
- gffrd 2mo agoThese are modern infomercials. Concrete pains ("planning a vacation is hard!"), shallow solutions that don't stand up to real-world use, and, in the end, a promise left unfilfilled. (And a thing in your drawer that takes up space.)
- fernandotakai 2mo agohonestly, one day i will understand why these guys go so hard on planning vacations. one of the best parts of vacations is actually planning it! trying to find restaurants, organizing your days, trying to fit activities -- that makes you look forward to your time off. really, i want to automate the boring parts of my life (did i really pay rent this month?) not the things that make me happy.
- tamimio 2mo agoIs 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.
- mirashii 2mo agoThe mistake here is thinking or treating AI tools as special or different in any way. We’ve had tooling that does this for decades. Ansible, puppet, saltstack, NixOS/home-manager, and dozens of other solutions. Even better, writing the configuration is extra simple now, since you can just ask your agent to do it.
- tamimio 2mo agoTrue but that’s not the same, think of it like a git but for AI related, I just open whatever harness, I authenticate to that centralized server, and it pulls everything and continue from where I was done last time, seamless and secure. Right now personally I have multiple machines, and I use key managers for the secret API, git for the skills, and sessions? Manually imported/exported. The alternative is using ssh (or herdr or others) and remotely accessing a specific machine where it has everything you need, but it’s not always reliable and better to avoid single point of failure too if anything goes wrong.
- SSLy 2mo agoconfig is easier than the memory/state/history stuff.
- epistasis 2mo agoI haven't found this yet but want to. There are several projects that injest coding sessions from lots of agents, but for the chat side I haven't found much, except replacements for Claude Desktop. Jan, for example.
- petcat 2mo agoNobody 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.
- threwaway555999 2mo ago[dead]
- jeromechoo 2mo agoThis has been my ongoing gripe. Someone put chat in front of a transformer model. It exploded like all prior versions of “AI chat” did. Now what? The moment someone figures out a new modality for LLMs is when we’ll see the next hockey stick.
- dsign 2mo ago> The moment someone figures out a new modality for LLMs is when we’ll see the next hockey stick. Honestly, that fills me with fear. LLMs exist to make money to their companies, and said companies are not gonna turn around and say, "you know what, go are going to make an android for each elderly person, that can not only help them with their medications, but that can actually make their medications, tailored to their biologies." Instead, they are going to go for the low-handing fruit of "you know Bob, the guy who makes jokes in meetings but who is grumpy about delivery timelines? Well, we are going to make an android to replace Bob. MetalBob will make even better jokes. The blue model will be able to explain in excruciating level of detail why timelines aren't reasonable. The red model will walk through the cubicles with a whip to ensure everybody keeps working all the time, and nobody goes to pee."
- dpkirchner 2mo agoPerhaps we could see a Yahoo Pipes style interface and feature set, handled by LLM (when simple transforms aren't an option).
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- popzxc 2mo agoI guess this is a feature worth announcing
- dude250711 2mo agoOne Claude one damn.
- hmokiguess 2mo ago[flagged]
- dang 2mo ago"Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hmokiguess 2mo agoMy point with above is to criticize their strategy, I have been losing faith on Anthropic and feeling like they are throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks in a more desperate fashion rather than careful one. This sort of decision to me, alongside all their other initiatives recently with shipping agentic PaaS rather than enabling others to build with their tools has been a miss on thoughtful leadership. Sorry for the snark take, thank you for moderating.
- dang 2mo agoThanks and yes, there's often a sensible HN comment behind posts like the one I was replying to.
- yieldcrv 2mo agoI love this Claude's mobile app wouldn't show any Cowork initiated conversations, even if those conversations didn't leverage cowork specific features
- adrithmetiqa 2mo agoMost normal users have no idea whether to choose chat or cowork. This makes sense for 95% of customers.
- alansaber 2mo agoExactly, a change like this will always be abhorrent to the 5% of technical users (aka this forum), and a net gain for the other 95%
- jimmydoe 2mo ago99% of the 5% can use claude code.
- rany_ 2mo agoThe 5% of technical users should not bear the brunt of the technical ineptitude of others.
- dbbk 2mo agoI am a technical user and I literally last week was trying to work out what the difference between ChatGPT Chat and Work was and couldn't figure it out (other than they bill you differently)
- snug 2mo agoReally excited to try the gsuite replacements, which seems like the bigger announcement than the title suggest
- ChickeNES 2mo agoWhy? I only use gsuite for interop between Claude and ChatGPT and other services...so a moat like that is totally worthless to me
- snug 2mo agoI still use Google Workspace for personal and work stuff, but for solo agent workflows, I think I have some use cases that would help me personally. I can let agents spin up working documents that I can review, comment on, and iterate over asynchronously. For example, I’ve spent the last few weeks building an internal ticketing setup for my agents so they stop trying to fix every tangential issue they encounter. I wrote a skill where subagents bubble out-of-scope issues up to a parent orchestrator, which decides whether to log a ticket. Currently, that setup mirrors between a local SQLite database and an Obsidian vault: agents write to SQLite, which syncs to Obsidian; when I edit notes in Obsidian, it syncs back. Native Claude docs mean I could ditch the Obsidian middleman for remote review—editing tickets from anywhere while keeping the core SQLite state local to where the agents execute.
- ChickeNES 2mo agoThat makes sense since you treat it as your central productivity manager, but for me all of Claude/Codex/etc are not productivity tools, just heterogeneous compute /for/ the productivity tool :P
- micromacrofoot 2mo agoIt'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.
- ceroxylon 2mo agoI 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.
- felixrieseberg 2mo agoHi, 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.
- LoganDark 2mo agoI liked the ability to explicitly only chat, without the possibility of Cowork activating since I have never wanted that. It's unclear how I can still guarantee that now.
- ChickeNES 2mo agoThis! My use of the web chat/app was already basically 0, now it will be 0.
- ecliptik 2mo agoWill there be a Claude Sheets too? I find myself using Claude to work with spreadsheets more than almost any other document type. It does okay now, but feel like it could be even better, especially with visualizations and formulas.
- erik_levitch 2mo agoThey could have figured that out before launching Cowork to everyone.
- irregularbowels 2mo ago[dead]
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- bearjaws 2mo agoBasically DOA in healthcare, even with a BAA I don't want Claude Cowork enabled in our workstations, ever.
- elpakal 2mo agowhy tho? genuinely curious
- VonLuderitz 2mo agoLess is more. Thanks.
- peterldowns 2mo agoHow 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727659 - Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49723408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49723408 based on their account submission history they have a 25% hit rate (!) Seems very, very weird.
- rgbrgb 2mo agomaybe someone wrote a classifier (or LLM wrapper) to find posts that will rank on hn
- orliesaurus 2mo ago> putting my tinfoil hat on and awaiting for replies
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- nwhnwh 2mo agoYou can make your post on top in some services by paying 5 dollars on fiver. I asked before about HN, and someone said it is hard to do... Maybe they found a way?
- dooglius 2mo agoIt would appear no one else submitted the posts in question, so the most obvious answer is the account is finding interesting articles that no one else has found. It would be one thing if it won out of many dupe posters, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening.
- arionhardison 2mo agoThis is valid. 1. each one is a first-party vendor announcement, submitted very close to the announcement and under the vendors headline. 2. Titles are "verbatim" vendor headlines. No editorializing which follows HN guidelines to the letter. 3. Someone; a script/agent is watching vendor feeds and X accounts then submitting within minutes of the posting. 4. Altman/Navier–Stokes post got [duped] so prob not inside thing.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- DanMcInerney 2mo agoThe 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 https://github.com/DanMcInerney/orchflows
- ricardobeat 2mo agoA bit meta, but this is one of the first posts in Anthropic's official blogs I've read that has distinctively Claude-style prose, thought less prominent than usual: What Claude makes doesn’t need its own place either. Enterprise admins choose when to turn them on the frustrating part was deciding where a task belonged What they’d started in one also didn’t carry into the other And the unnecessary school-project level verbosity: You can choose how Claude checks in with you. By default, Claude asks before taking an action. If you’d rather let it keep working and check in only when something needs a closer look, you can turn that on. You keep the final say.
- evan_ 2mo agonot once did I ever understand what the difference was between Claude Chat and Claude Cowork. I use both and I mostly just guessed when to use Cowork.
- pepitogarvan 2mo agoI found out the claude compro crestes a large vm in my fisk which i did not want.
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- VortexLain 2mo agoI really hope ChatGPT doesn't follow suit. Chat and Work serve 2 distinct tasks, and unifying Chat and Codex limits will cause the users to avoid using Chat in order to save the tokens for Codex.
- tag2103 2mo agoWhy would anyone install software that the owner himself said is unsafe to use?
- hughw 2mo agoJust 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?
- sujee 2mo agoGood 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/ 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.
- aetherspawn 2mo ago1) If you want to make Claude usable how about addressing the fact that OpenAI 20x lasts all day on Astra, yet Claude 20x pips out in 20 mins of agentic with Fable 5.1, which is totally useless. And unlike Sol: Opus like yoda, anything for unusable he is. 2) The first AI company to reduce their token pricing such that Astra/Fable can run for less than $150/day from credits would see a 5x usage increase and 20x spend increase from me. It’s currently around $500 for Astra and $5000 for Claude. 3) They seem to recently have addressed the fact that their safeguards were OTT so kudos to them for realising and now Fable is usable for wire and memory level programming.
- john_smith_de 2mo ago[flagged]
- john_smith_de 2mo ago[dead]