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Cowork, Chat and Code
Three ways to work with Claude, and picking the wrong one is the most common way to have a bad time.
| What it is for | What you get back | |
|---|---|---|
| Chat | A conversation. Questions, drafts, thinking out loud | Words in the window |
| Cowork | A job. Files read and produced, steps run for you | Finished documents in your account |
| Claude Code | A codebase, in a terminal or an editor | Commits and changed files |
The line between Chat and Cowork is not difficulty, it is shape. "Explain what this spreadsheet is telling me" is a conversation. "Clean these twelve exports, produce the summary and build the deck" is a job, and a job has steps, files and a finish.
A test that works
- Would you have to leave and come back? If the work takes longer than you want to sit and watch, it is Cowork.
- Does it end in a file? A spreadsheet, a document, a deck. Chat ends in a message.
- Does it touch more than one thing? Several files, or a file plus a connected app.
- Is it code in a repository? Then it is Claude Code, which is a different course.
Two of those and you are in the right place.
They are not sealed off from each other
A Cowork session can produce something you then discuss in Chat, and a project you built for Chat can be linked into Cowork. The skills you write in this course follow the same open standard Claude Code uses, so a procedure you teach once can be used in more than one place.
It is not free
Cowork costs more of your usage than Chat does, because it is running steps rather than writing an answer. That is a reason to send it real jobs and not questions, not a reason to avoid it.
Try it yourself
- Take the last five things you asked Claude in Chat. Which of them were jobs pretending to be questions?
- Pick one of those and hold on to it. Lesson 2 gives it to Cowork.
Little by little, you're building something great.