What's the point of Cowork when you have Claude Code?
Is Cowork just a friendlier layer for non-technical users? Because if so, the Claude Code Desktop app pretty much solves that already — so what's the actual point of Cowork?
I used to use it exactly the way Anthropic promotes it: for non-coding tasks like creating documents, PDFs, sales material, and so on. But I kept running into walls. Claude Code turned out to be far more capable and flexible for the same work. A few things that pushed me away from Cowork:
- You can't switch models mid-session. You have to commit to one model for the entire session, which is really limiting.
- You can't rewind. If something goes off track, you're stuck.
- No slash commands or the deeper control that Claude Code gives you out of the box.
- Weaker results for document creation — in my experience, Claude Code just produces better output.
On top of that, Cowork seems to rely on workarounds — like using osascript to do things on your computer — whereas Claude Code does a lot of that directly and more reliably.
These days I just use Claude Code for everything, even non-coding tasks. So I'm genuinely curious: is there a use case where Cowork clearly wins, or is Claude Code strictly the better tool now?