Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Claude Code walked so Cowork could run

22 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker reflects on the launch trajectories of two products: Claude Code and Cowork. Claude Code initially saw modest usage, with users struggling to understand its purpose and the model's performance being sub‑par. Over time, key inflection points—first with the release of Opus 4 and later in November—triggered accelerating growth, leading to a steep adoption curve. In contrast, Cowork experienced an immediate market hit upon release, driven by latent demand that emerged as users applied Claude Code to non‑technical tasks. After a period of exploration, the team decided to embed Claude Code directly into the Cowork desktop application, a decision that was executed in roughly ten days, resulting in a swift product rollout.

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Qvot code. When we released it, it was not immediately a hit. It became a hit over time and there was a few inflection points. One was Opus 4 and then in November it inflected and it just keeps inflecting. The growth just keeps getting steeper and steeper and steeper every day. But for the first few months, it wasn't a hit. People used it, but a lot of people couldn't figure out how to use it. They didn't know what it was for. The model still wasn't very good. Cowork when we released it, it was just immediately a hit. Much more so than Claud Code was early on. The place Cowork came from is just this latent demand. Like we saw people using Claude code for these non technical things and we're trying to figure out what do we do. And so for a few months the team was exploring, they were trying all sor different options and in the end someone was just like, what if we just take Quad code and put it in the desktop app? That's essentially the thing that worked. So over 10 days they just completely used Quad code to build it.