First impressions of Claude Cowork

Summary

In this newsletter:First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s general agentFly’s new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same timeMy answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMsPlus 4 links and 1 quotation and 1 TILIf you find this newsletter useful, please consider sponsoring me via GitHub. $10/month and higher sponsors get a monthly newsletter with my summary of the most important trends of the past 30 days - here are previews from August and September.New from Anthropic today is Claude Cowork, a “research preview” that they describe as “Claude Code for the rest of your work”. It’s currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month plans) as part of the updated Claude Desktop macOS application.I’ve been saying for a while now that Claude Code is a “general agent” disguised as a developer tool. It can help you with any computer task that can be achieved by executing code or running terminal commands... which covers almost anything, provided you know what you’re doing with it! What it really needs is a UI that doesn’t involve the terminal and a name that doesn’t scare away non-developers.“Cowork” is a pretty solid choice on the name front!The interface for Cowork is a new tab in the Claude desktop app, called Cowork. It sits next to the existing Chat and Code tabs.It looks very similar to the desktop interface for regular Claude Code. You start with a prompt, optionally attaching a folder of files. It then starts work.I tried it out against my perpetually growing “blog-drafts” folder with the following prompt:Look at my drafts that were started within the last three months and then check that I didn’t publish them on simonwillison.net using a search against content on that site and then suggest the ones that are most close to being readyIt started by running this command:find /sessions/zealous-bold-ramanujan/mnt/blog-drafts \ -type f \( -name “*.md” -o -name “*.txt” -o -name “*.ht...