Vibe Check: Claude Cowork Is Claude Code for the Rest of Us

Anthropic just dropped Claude Cowork—essentially Claude Code for everyone, not just engineers—and we got to chat about it with a product engineer at Anthropic who helped build it.

In this live Vibe Check, Dan Shipper and Kieran Klaassen explore the new interface together, testing what works (and what doesn't) in real time. Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg joins midway through to explain the philosophy behind Cowork's design: why it separates "Tasks" from "Chats," how the queue system lets you send messages while the agent is working, and what "agent-native" architecture means in practice. They also dig into Skills—Claude's prompt system that lets you customize how it works—and the Chrome connector for browser automation.

This is a raw, unfiltered first look at what might be the future of how knowledge workers interact with AI: async workflows instead of turn-by-turn chat.

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00:01:00 - What is Claude Cowork

00:02:36 - First demo: competitor analysis

00:03:33 - Email drafting that sounds like me

00:06:18 - Calendar audit running for an hour

00:07:39 - Book taxonomy demo

00:08:42 - PostHog analytics via Chrome browsing

00:14:36 - Chat vs Code vs Cowork: when to use what

00:31:06 - Felix from Anthropic joins

00:36:39 - Why they built it in a week and a half

00:37:57 - Design decision: why a separate tab

00:43:57 - Skills as the primary hackable surface

00:49:36 - Agent-native architecture principles

00:56:57 - The origin story of skills at Anthropic

01:03:00 - Our final rating