People 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.
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.
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.
These 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.
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.
Hi, 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.
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.
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.
Nobody 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.
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.
My personal hot take is that the product people (engineers too probably) at these companies are just straight up lazy. Yes, a new UI paradigm is hard, but it's been painfully obvious that chat just absolutely sucks. It's also obvious that some DSL-ish thing is possible, something that just does token juggling and the end-user sees some UI behavior.
I know this all sounds abstract. I've been mulling over it for the past year and it's very hard; and LLMs are super janky and inconsistent so it's 100% not trivial. So in some sense I understand why a lazy bottom-of-the-barrel "chat interface" has become the de facto standard.
It's funny to me that instead of moving existing tech to a word in word out paradigm, people are dropping millions getting the chat to work with the existing paradigm.
Probably inevitable, but seems like a lot of disruption could happen there.
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.
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.
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.
I solved this with task management and got work trees.
The downside of course is branching in got, but I usually don’t go of course more then a handful of tasks.
I had to engineer my own ticket management to keep opus on target. It’s been great for managing work, history, audit trails and commits are tagged with the task id.
I implemented subtasks to deal with the way Claude likes to stage its own objectives.
Then I made enforcement logic in the task manager so tasks can’t be closed out until reviewers have consensus on the same sha.
The adhd that is Anthropic demanded I build it and now I’m knocking out issues faster than Batman.
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
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
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 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.
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
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.
I don't like this. I liked being able to tell Claude I didn't want it to use my computer, because Cowork does this annoying thing where it minimizes and rearranges all my windows and it's incredibly disruptive. Ugh.
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
It'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.
Is 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.
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.
True 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.
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.
A 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.
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.
"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.
I see a version of that all the time and would never, ever do it.
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
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.
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.
I know this all sounds abstract. I've been mulling over it for the past year and it's very hard; and LLMs are super janky and inconsistent so it's 100% not trivial. So in some sense I understand why a lazy bottom-of-the-barrel "chat interface" has become the de facto standard.
Probably inevitable, but seems like a lot of disruption could happen there.
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.
The moment someone figures out a new modality for LLMs is when we’ll see the next hockey stick.
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.
The downside of course is branching in got, but I usually don’t go of course more then a handful of tasks.
I had to engineer my own ticket management to keep opus on target. It’s been great for managing work, history, audit trails and commits are tagged with the task id.
I implemented subtasks to deal with the way Claude likes to stage its own objectives.
Then I made enforcement logic in the task manager so tasks can’t be closed out until reviewers have consensus on the same sha.
The adhd that is Anthropic demanded I build it and now I’m knocking out issues faster than Batman.
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
"Sure! And since you were asking me about lobsters yesterday, I'll make it red and seafood themed!"
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.
Feels like the same "let us do _all_ of the thinking for you" messaging that Microsoft has with Copilot.
Honestly aside from the voice it uses you wouldn't notice a difference. Switching costs are low, vote with your wallet.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BUAnyVAanac&ra=m
You need to use frontier models to understand where the puck is going, but also to use local ones for anything remotely sensitive.
I feel like Claude has some of the best UX, and hope this doesn’t dilute the experience.
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
Genuinely curious.
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.
Claude's mobile app wouldn't show any Cowork initiated conversations, even if those conversations didn't leverage cowork specific features
"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