Claude Cowork 101: How to automate your workday without touching code | JJ Englert (Tenex)

**JJ Englert** (0:00)
One of the things I love about having this project system, you're orchestrating now, even though you might not be a developer, you're now an AI orchestrator. You can run many agents at once and have this top level view to be able to just quickly see which agent needs your attention and just give them those permissions or to pop back in.

**Claire Vo** (0:16)
I don't know, this is like very sad. All my friends are agents. I'm a solo founder. It is like very hard to just me by myself ensure that all my ideas are great.

**JJ Englert** (0:25)
When you use sub agents, it will spin up three different agents, and each of those agents can have their own persona with a fresh context window, meaning fresh perspective to go and look at your work in an objective way.

**Claire Vo** (0:36)
If you're a product manager, build it and put your boss in there, your engineering partner, and your customer and say, every PRD review from these three points of view and give me feedback. If you're in marketing, your ICP, I think there's just a lot of places where this multi-view feedback mechanism is super useful.

**JJ Englert** (0:53)
100 percent. We could take this a step further and say, hey, create this sub advisory skill, maybe three of the agents, like one agent is literally your boss, that you send an agent to go research who your boss is, their role, their perspective, and have them simulate the feedback that they might give you before you even go to them. The sky is the limit here. You just got to tell Claude what to do and it's going to go do it for you.

**Claire Vo** (1:16)
Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, Product Leader and AI Obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. When Claude Cowork first came out, I was pretty much a skeptic, but I have been hearing more and more that Cowork is the way that everybody I know, especially those who are a little less technical than us engineers, get their daily work done, which is why I'm so excited to have JJ Englert here from Tenex who is a Cowork power user, but is going to take a step back and show us how to zero to one on Anthropic's new Get Work Done tool. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Tines, the intelligent workflow platform powering the world's most important work. Business moves faster than the system is meant to support it. Teams are stuck with repetitive tasks, scattered tools and hard to reach data. AI has huge promise, but struggles when everything underneath is fragmented. Tines fixes that. It unifies your tools, data and processes in one secure, flexible platform, blending a jet-tick AI, automation and human-led intervention. Teams get their time back, workflows run smarter and AI actually delivers real value. Customers now automate over 1.5 billion actions every week. Tines is trusted by companies like Canva, Coinbase, Databricks, GitLab, Mars and Reddit. Try Tines at tines.com/howiai. JJ, welcome to How I AI.

**JJ Englert** (2:52)
It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

**Claire Vo** (2:54)
I'm excited about what you're going to show us because when Claude Cowork, which is what we're going to talk about, first came out, I wrote this article that blew up on Twitter and a bunch of podcasts talked about it, which was, who is Cowork for anyway? Because when I first tried it, it seemed like a UI that had just been slapped on top of Claude Code, and I looked at it and I said, okay, if you're not in Claude Code all day, writing in the terminal, but you're not super technical, what is this product that's in the middle? Shame on me because as it happens, product continues to progress week over week, the Anthropic team, the Claude team is cooking non-stop, and I just kept hearing more and more from my non-technical friends, oh my god, Cowork's amazing, or oh my god, I use Cowork to do everything in my job now. And then, you know, I've given it a spin in the past couple of weeks, and the UI has really gotten there, what it can do really has gotten there. And so I'm so excited for you to show us the zero to one for Cowork. And I just have to ask you, what got you hooked on this particular tool?

**JJ Englert** (4:05)
Yeah, I think like many, we were just experimenting with it. And then quickly I saw that how easy it was to connect your business tooling to it. Whereas I built a lot in Claude Code, but if I wanted to just connect my Slack, my Gmail, my Notion, Cowork is just one click, and then all of a sudden you have an AI processing all of that information, helping you do your job better. And it's just so easy. And so that's where it started. But then I started to really go deep on it. I'm like, oh my god, this is really helping me my day to day. So I use Cowork for all of my productivity stuff of like emailing, slacks, building projects and documents. And then Claude Code I still build with.