Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

It 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.

They are all valid front page submissions by the looks of them and they appear to be the first ones submitted. It wouldn’t be hard to do if you cared enough to configure notifications for frontier announcements. If someone were using technology to influence submissions or misuse HN, that would be a concern but I don’t see any evidence of that.

maybe someone wrote a classifier (or LLM wrapper) to find posts that will rank on hn

You 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?

> putting my tinfoil hat on and awaiting for replies

I hope not Chat is still all you can eat and Work uses Codex tokens. I can see why they would want people to think they wanted this without thinking about how it currently works. If Chat starts eating tokens then there is not much reason to use Chat other than most people don't live in the command line like developers. Claude Chat / Cowork already eats tokens either way so not much of a change really. I have never used Work since if I want access to local files the CLI is a much better interface combined with an IDE, but can see the appeal to non-developers.

GPT Chat seems smarter for business questions or planning that does not require iteration or wrangling data sources.

But Work gives the model a computer instance it can use for programmatic data access, API munging, etc.

Success cases I’ve had: chat - read the reports in my Gmail and put a counter proposal together.

Work - cross reference all the options with commute time using traffic aware map data. Ground it on drop off / pick up times from each option’s stated rules and hours. Create a table with commute and idle time break downs.

The 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.

In one of the earlier iterations of this they at least made the UX distinguish Codex vs. ChatGPT which I really enjoyed.

I must admit I spent a little time in ChatGPT this weekend, thinking I was in Codex. After some unexpected behavior (disappointed) I realized my mistake.

I sometimes get very different answers if I ask the chat product the same question multiple times.

The fact that people asked for it means that there is a demand for it. Maybe you aren't the target audience? One size can't fit all. People just have to adjust and go.

This is a nightmare scenario to me.

"Claude, prepare me a presentation on XYZ."

I get to work, go straight to the meeting room, and pull up what it made to present.

It's barely coherent nonsense. Lots of irrelevant details, buzz words, wrong charts or confusing phrasing. Obviously LLM output.

I read it out.

When I'm done, I get a question about one of Claude's incorrectly inferred details.

The shame instantly kills me.

This is a scenario I've seen play out with coworkers. Except that last part, instead of dying or owning up to the mistake of trusting LLM output they waffle. Their shame circuit is broken.

Because nobody actually knows what anybody else’s job consists of. But everyone is familiar with how jobs work in the ‘romcom job universe’ where workplace stakes are generally driven by ‘I have this really important make-or-break presentation due Friday!’

I suspect it’s because writers don’t normally have jobs and the only time they are ever in offices it’s to deliver a pitch for a project.

I'm retired and write code as a hobby, not presentations or docs, but it fits how I use exe.dev to make a code change. I will have a conversation with the AI, then say "Please go ahead" and close my laptop to do something else. Since I use web browsers exclusively for this, I can check on its progress from my phone, tablet, or laptop.

(They have iOS and Android apps too, but I've never bothered to install them.)

I've found basically all of the release presentations are completely irrelevant and seem to target a very narrow subset of the population. They're always reserving something like a restaurant or a sports venue or generating a new slide deck for their business meeting. Perhaps these companies would do better if they could make a use case for regular people. You know, the 90% of the folks out there working normal jobs and not spending infinite money. I don't think I know a single person who has made a restaurant reservation more than once or twice (mostly never) in their entire life. Maybe I'm the weirdo here, but I can't relate to any of these demonstrations.

"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.

weirdly 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

I use Claude/opencode and Orca and Hermes across my vpses, Macbook, Linux, and iOS devices. This is exactly how I want to keep working.

It aligns with me pretty well. Not exactly presentations, but it’s great to be able to do stuff on the go when an idea or motivation strikes.

I do this pretty regularly. It's great.

Just like every demo is some pathetic one shot trash game that nobody would play, or something equally inane.

From a user experience standpoint this sounds like a clear win. Congratulations.

With AI safety top of mind so much lately, I can't help but notice the announcement does not address this.

With "Chat" mode, there was a user expectation that session had only limited capability to produce unexpected side effects, read sensitive files, etc.

With "Cowork" mode, it seems like more powerful capabilities have been on by default, requiring deep settings and safety understanding to disable if desired.

Merging modes feels like it is removing a simple and easy to understand risk management tool. How does the combined mode help users understand, manage and feel confident about what risks they are accepting?

> Claude Design, Claude Docs, and Claude Slides

Why/when would I ever need any of these? Can't y'all focus on useful features instead?

It's not a bad idea, however if Cowork, Designs, Docs and Slides are still different products, it'd be great for the user to know they are being routed to that particular product automatically because of what they were asking for in their prompt.

this is good change for ux. thanks

I'm operating Team accounts, are there changes on how org-wide skill/plugin get loaded and used?

Will 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.

Why is Claude Code still proprietary, while Codex is Open Source? What would it take to fix that? This is a major reason to pick OAI models over Anthropic (because while you can use an open agent with any model, the AI labs charge much more for that interaction style).

I 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.

How do you guys have so many resources but no taste? It’s crazy.

We’re working on this problem at my company. All of our competitors have churned out a bunch of generic chat based agents (basic harness with a few tools connected and different system prompts) to do basic stuff you’d used to do from a wizard or even just a couple of buttons in a form. We’re steering away from this by building full ‘surface’ agents with A2UI and an initial surface message. The users just see a normal looking web application but under the hood it’s all driven by a harness. UI updates are effectively just new events received by the client. Events are either generated by an LLM directly, or deterministically - it’s up to the dev.

I don't think it's that anyone wants the interface to be chat. I think it's that the underlying technology is inherently words in and words out. It's similar to how devices with capacitive screens are most naturally going to support tapping, dragging, and pinching.

The great confusion for Anthropic and OAI is how to break out from pure chat without signalling you in fact intend to eat all of your customer's business too.

IMO no one knows what LLMs are capable of yet and the goal post keeping moving every few months that building any specific UIs right now risks rendering them obsolete or too slow.

e.g. We went from somewhat smarter code autocomplete, to asking chatgpt copy paste, to cli agent running inside your project, managing session, to GUI to manage that, to projects where you talk to a "Chief of Staff" agent that manages other sessions, to who knows what's next.

I think the right interfaces for LLMs right now need to be very simple and easy to change/evolve. And chat still seems to be the best default solution.

This 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.

It’s not surprising.

Technology folks don’t really understand people and what they need.

This always happens. This is why woz needed Steve.

Steve Jobs is sorely missed tbh. For all the shit he got - he was a true visionary. He lived at the intersection of technology and the humanities… he kept preaching this. And now we are seeing why.

Chat is only tedious because it’s slow. If models responded in 300ms it would be the ideal interface.

One thing I would like is a tree-like chat structure like reddit / HN. Many times I abandon the direction things have gone but would like to resume at some ancestor or sibling response.

Do you know that you can have multiple chats at the same time?

Before OpenAI dropped ChatGPT, nobody knew chat would be such a hit. Several labs had versions of these things, Google engineers were getting finessed by a rudimentary model just like in the movie Ex Machina that came out 10 years prior which was satirizing Google

But I don't agree that they aren't product-ized. There are many applications doing calls to LLMs behind the scenes and are hits, leveraging structured data very heavily and not having conversations with users at all. I would say that there is a predictable scope creep from executives to surface a conversational aspect though. We need to bring representation to that so we can point to some other best practice to push back

Exactly, 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%

I 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

> 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.

I 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.

Of the major providers, Codex/Astra. By far the highest quality model, especially for cross-discipline work.

codex (their app) is pretty good and lots of banked resets, luna is cost effective and Astra seems better than Fable for many tasks. Most important one is less refusals and I can use it the way I want without the fear of getting banned. I do like Claude Code a lot when it comes to pure coding use cases but the work often touches outside code and I don't want to keep switching

Opencode Go.

Why? I only use gsuite for interop between Claude and ChatGPT and other services...so a moat like that is totally worthless to me

Claude 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

The 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.

I 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.

One Claude one damn.

"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