Claude Cowork

.... I'm in awe

I have been waiting for Claude Cowork to launch ever since I first heard about it. Claude defines it as:
”Cowork brings Claude Code’s agentic capabilities to the desktop app (macOS only)—for everyday, non-coding work. Give Claude access to a folder and it reads, edits, and creates files: organizing downloads, turning receipts into spreadsheets, drafting reports from notes. Set a task and step away, or steer as you go.”

Ok, that sounds kinda cool… but it’s a lot more. In short it can take any action within your desktop environment that you want, assuming you have connected/granted permission to Claude to do so. I think it’s super important to note here that this is where you partner with Security and IT and Legal to decide what connections, plugins, etc., are fine to connect to Claude. At Civis, much of our software is, but not our HRIS, just yet. We need to test it more. But Google Workspace? Confluence? Slack? Check, check, check.

I decided to test it earlier this week, so I went big. We had a big project on Trello that we were sunsetting- 10 boards, over 3,000 cards. We wanted to archive the board, but that’s an insane amount of copy/pasting. An export wasn’t really super useful, since we’d have to import it somewhere to see all the data.

So I asked Claude CoWork:
I would like to convert to a google doc all the data found at [redacted] to include Board, Status, Card information. Is that something you can do? Before executing, what other information would you need?

It told me it needed me to be logged into everything and make sure I had the Chrome browser plug in. After everything was gtg, I came back and told Claude so…

And then I watched the magic occur. It created a to-do list in the upper right hand of the screen, and I watched as it went to every board and card, copied, then pasted. Then it went to Google Docs and pasted everything there. As it needed permissions, I just clicked Allow (because I don’t allow always, it asks a lot- I like that), and watched it work.

It took Claude 19 minutes.

And that’s probably because I wondered off to my email and it was waiting for me to click allow a few times.

What was the result?

A 1000 page google doc export. Formatted. Saved forever as a knowledge base.

Of course I had to ask- How long would this have taken a highly competent human?

I have had many copy/paste projects throughout my career. Now gone. My intern Claude can now do this for me!

This was just my first project. I am going to explore more in the coming weeks.

Oh!!! One more thing- that “Erin’s voice” file I created last week? Yes, it will come in handy.

I uploaded it to Cowork and asked how to make it a default setting (not just a one-off project folder), and it told me how to create a skill. Cowork then MADE THE SKILL FOR ME.

Think of the applications across your organization! If you have an organizational style guide, you can upload it to cowork and ask it to create a skill file and then everyone would have access to it (if your admins allow). Game changer.

Have you tried CoWork? What are you thinking of building?