Claude Cowork is Here! Full Breakdown + Testing

Okay, we have to talk. It's not often that something is released in the AI space that I consider a serious breakthrough. But this is one of those moments. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, which you might know as one of the main competitors to ChatGPT and Gemini, released a new thing. They call it Claude Cowork and it's probably the closest thing to a consumer AGI like product that I have seen yet. Now it's just a research preview. It's the very first look, they built this thing in 10 days. But I think a lot of people come into AI with this idea of AI actually doing everything for them, and then they realize that the reality right now is that it's more of an assistant to you. This product changes that. It's called co work. The availability is very limited. You need to be on a max plan, and it's only available on the Mac desktop app. Again, it's a research preview for now, but I really want to talk to you about it and show you some first demos of it actually working on my machine here. And if you're wondering what this is about, well, let me give it to you in two ways. First of all, in the simplest term possible, this is an agentic AI system that is actually built to do things for you, to move files around, to connect to some other services with as little involvement from you as possible. That's the idea. It is a different version of another app that you might already be familiar with. Claude Code, that was their application for developers that was already doing this, writing code, creating files, pushing it to GitHub repositories, hosting it on the web all by itself, and way more than that too. And Claude Code was one of the big hits in the entire AI space over the past. What is it, I think 10 months since it released. An interesting thing about Claude Code, as it got better over time, was that people were bastardizing the developer tool to do other tasks. They were using it to develop marketing plans, they were using it to develop product ideas. They connected it to image and video APIs and created whole Instagram campaigns with it and stuff like that. And as that kept happening, some startups took notice of that and they built a standalone product. You might be familiar with products like Manus and genspark that we also covered on this channel recently. They're just these agentic products that try to build this universal agentic tool, but for non developers. Well, and that's where we arrive at Claude Cowork, this new research preview from Anthropic. They now built their own version of an agentic AI system for non developers. And that's what we'll be looking at today. It's a system that can create and organize files, it can send messages, it can connect to other applications. Spoiler alert. It's really not that good at it, just like all other connectors before. But the point is, this is the AI assistant that most people, when they hear about AI, are secretly hoping for. They want it to organize their life, make them more money, make them happy, or free up their time, all that. But what they find is a chat interface where they actually have to take action. Still super useful, but we know there's more, and this is the first product from one of the big players that attempts to do that. So let's dive right in and let me show you what it can do. In principle, this is a first look at a research preview. As I mentioned, this is only available on the Mac app app on the Max plan, which is $100 per month. And very basically you see the same chat interface that you might be familiar with from other apps, but this goes way deeper because it has access to your drive, it has access to your connectors. If I just briefly check the settings here, you'll see if I go into connectors, I could connect all of these external services. Now the problem here is these haven't worked super reliably before and that doesn't change nothing about these connectors changed right now what has worked here before is here, this file system plugin where it just deals with your local files. Brave Search, which is just an alternative search engine to Google, works decently well. And then I've said this before on the channel, but Claude and Chrome, the little extension that if you go into Google Chrome that can like remote control your browser, those three things worked really well. And all of those are accessible within Claude Cowork. Okay, so with that being said, we're basically ready to give this a first try by doing one of the demo examples they showed in their blog. So saying something like, help me organize all of the files on my desktop. So as I type in this prompt, I have to do one critical thing, which is actually choose a working folder. So I'll just select the desktop. I'll tell it to always allow access to my desktop here and now it can work there. Let's just say let's go and see how this performs live. Now, if you look here over at my desktop, you will see that it is pretty clean. But that's because I use this sneaky sneaky technique where every time there's a lot of files, I just create a new folder called before and then the current date and then I dump everything else in in there. So within these folders there's hundreds if not thousands of files that are just not visible, but they're still on my desktop and it's still a mess. Let's see if Claude Cowork can help. Okay, so you'll see a lot of similarities here to Claude code if you're familiar with that already. It starts by creating a plan and asking you follow up questions here. In this case, it asks me, how would you like me to organize your desktop files? Well, I want them by project topic screenshots I don't want to delete. I'll just move them to a screenshots folder. And then it asks if it should consolidate existing archive folders. Yeah, merge into one archive. Like this technique of me creating archive folder every few weeks is not great. Now instead of paying off the debt and we're back in the day, I was like, yeah, let's future ego deal with that. I don't have to plot Cowork will. Maybe it does pay off to be lazy after all in this agentic future. Well, let's see how this goes. Maybe I'm wrong. Okay, so it created a categorization system for various things that I worked on. Found wallpapers, but also projects related to my book that is actually now available on Amazon. Quick shout out, find the link in the description. You can get it now. But this is a ultimate chatgpt prompt book written by me. But just know this is the type of book that is really aimed at people who are getting into the space. So it's a perfect gift for a family member. If you're watching this channel and checking out the latest Gentex developments, you're probably a bit further along. Anyway, link in the description and let's return to reviewing this. Okay. Created a new folder structure. It removed it cleaned up several files and there it is. It actually did not prompt me a single time. Okay, let's review. So here is my desktop. Okay. Okay. This is cleaner than ever. I love that it kept this file documents for demos that I created, I had like just a bunch of different example images and videos I used over time. Beyond that, I have a screenshots folder with all screenshots. Okay. Wallpapers, everything relating to the book and then a big archive folder. Okay, so I see. So this is where a lot of the mess is nested within. So okay, so I'll just tell it I want you to also organize the archive folder and, and then maybe if I like what I see, we can merge that with the desktop organization. But initially this worked really well. Just consolidating those archives and finding all the nested archives would have been a tedious task. Okay, follow up questions and yeah, I want to merge relevant documents with existing desktop folders. And as this finishes up, I'll actually start a second task, which this one will be using the Chrome extension so it can remote control my browser. Because I've just found this thing to work most reliably out of all the connectors they have there, except the one that uses your file system too. So just try something simple and let's see, this is the first attempt of me doing this here and I'll just show you the result as is. So let's see if it can do it. Open my Gmail account in the browser and tell me about the three most important emails from the past 24 hours. Okay, so in my Gmail account I actually already opened up spam email that I have where I just subscribe to different services and newsletters and I don't really check it regularly and I just wonder what it'll up with here. So let's just watch it work. All right, there it is. It opened up all the emails in our main YouTube inbox and then it says this Google Workspace security alert is important. Okay, sounds about right. And then a paid video collaboration and a customer having trouble with access. I'll make sure to let the team know about this. Other than that, I'm here to judge how well it pulled in the context, not how well it prioritized these things, as this doesn't have any context on what we actually care about. For example, we're phasing out the collaboration with external companies so the sponsor email would not be relevant here. But it seemed to have worked as I expect and it was really simple, even simpler than using the web browser add on because usually when it works within here, you kind of have a separate window, a separate thing to manage in your head. Now it kind of got centralized into Claude Cowork, which I really like because I could just do tasks from within here together with all the other AI related tasks. But now I just know it has this extra layer of actually having access to my browser, to my files. So that's really neat. Now to round out the video, let's return to the desktop organization and see what it did here. And as you can see, it successfully worked in parallel with this other task, and it merged all the files on the desktop. Here's a big overview. So now it has more folders, and if I open up the archive file, well, this looks way better than what we looked at just a minute ago. All the presentations, all the images, some bookmarks that I don't need. This is actually useful. All my system prompts that I worked with on the desktop are right here. These installers I don't need. This is a great way to get a grasp of your desktop. Now, I want to do one last thing, because this really shows how everything that you've learned in AI so far combines with this new tool. But it just reaches deeper into your world and your computer, and that is by turning it into something different, and that is by creating a web app that visualizes the new file structure through on Artifact, which is an application or website. And there it is. Okay, so this is the web app. Honestly, at first I thought, okay, what a useless example. You could have come up with something else. But now that I see this, not bad. Look, a tree map. Okay, Deep archive. Not bad. And ultimately the point is that it just brings everything together, but it gives its deeper reach in one app, in one interface. I don't have to have terminals open. I don't have to have multiple browser tabs open. It's just here in this app here under the Cowork tab. And if I just want to use chat, as I have been before, well, I just tab over and do that over here. If I'm developing an application, I could tab over here and use it in this code tab. But with Claude code, I've still been using the command line interface, but now that it's all here, it just makes sense. Now, arguably, this is just a research preview, and as they stated themselves, they built this thing in 10 days. But I really do strongly believe that this is the direction the AI space is developing into. And just because the connectors are not that reliable yet, doesn't mean it will stay that way in the future. Organizing your desktop makes sense. Me and the team need to do more research and more testing to find further use cases that will work. And we'll follow up with that and Friday's news. You can use video and future videos, so subscribe for that. But ultimately, I know that this is a direction that all big companies will pursue, and all smaller companies that will build features like this will eventually have to niche down to something else, because this is too big of an idea for. For one of the big players not to build themselves this point, it's just a question of time when we'll see the ChatGPT version of this and future versions from Anthropic that are not research previews, which, all things considered, actually works kind of well already. All right, that's everything I have for today. My name is Igor Pagani, and I hope you have a wonderful day.