How to Use Claude's Massive New Upgrades

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, how to use all of Claude's massive new upgrades.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. Yesterday was kind of a big politics and society episode. Today, we're running all the way in the other direction with something a lot more practical. There have been so many new things that have come out for Claude Code and Claude Cowork that it was time to go through them all. And it ended up running quite long, so we will end up not doing the headlines today. We will be back with a normal headlines episode tomorrow. Two more things to quickly flag before we get into that. First, Agent Madness is live. The round of 64 is going. Hundreds of you have voted. And voting will close for this first round at the end of the day on Thursday, March 26th. So go to agentmadness.ai to check that out. And finally, I'm noticing that I'm doing a lot more little companion experiences with these episodes. And so as of today, we're launching play.aid Daily brief.ai, which is where all of those fun little experiences live. So for example, today, you can find the checklist of things to try with Claude right now. And again, that'll live at play.aid Daily brief.ai. With all that out of the way, let's talk about all the cool new things you can do with Claude. Every other day or so for the last month, there has been some part of the headlines where Claude launched some new feature or upgrade for Claude Code or Cowork or some other part of the Claude ecosystem. And at this point, it has officially gotten to the point where we needed to do a full-on retrospective of everything that has launched over the last month or so to help you guys map out and figure out how to use all of these big new upgrades. Now, of course, this comes in a specific lineage of updates. Step one was the models. The OPUS 4.5 GPT-52 generation of models that came about at the end of last year catapulted us into a new capability era that OPUS 4.6, GPT-53 codecs and GPT-54 have continued. Step two, of course, was the unlock that OpenClaw represented. It was a harness that brought with it a whole bunch of concepts and user interaction patterns and behavior sets that made building your own agents and agent teams all of a sudden more viable and more realistic. Step three has been the absolute race ever since OpenClaw blew up to bring those types of features to all the other AI products. This qualification trend has been one of the big themes ever since OpenClaw launched. Now, when OpenClaw's founder Peter Steinberger was hired by OpenAI, some people jumped in to say that Anthropic had made a big goof by not bringing him over there. Others' response was a little bit closer to, I don't know man, let's let them cook and see what happens. And certainly you have to think that the people saying let them cook are feeling pretty vindicated right now. The Claudefication of Claude, maybe we'll call it the Claudefication, kicked off at the end of February with Remote Control. Remote Control was a way to bring Claude Code specifically to your mobile experience. Both the mobile capabilities of OpenClaw, as well as its ability to bridge between different types of devices, were some of the parts of that system that people were most excited about. And so it wasn't all that surprising to see Claude Code jump on that first. What's more, even outside of OpenClaw, this is such a natural extension of the product that you got to imagine that this would have happened anyway. The way that Remote Control works is that you start your task in your Claude Code Terminal session, and then you can pick it up and continue working from your phone. Now there's nothing happening in the cloud here. Basically, when you've started that Remote Control session on your machine, Claude is going to continue to run locally that entire time. That gives Remote Control the ability to use your full environment, including your file system, MCP servers, tools, and product configurations, and you can go back and forth interchangeably. In the docs they write, Unlike Claude Code on the web, which runs on cloud infrastructure, Remote Control sessions run directly on your machine and interact with your local file system. The web and mobile interfaces are just a window into that local session. There are three ways to start a Remote Control session. You can start a dedicated Remote Control server by navigating to the specific project directory you want to work on and running the Claude Remote Control command. From there Claude will display a session URL that you can use to connect from another device. You can also press your spacebar to get a QR code that you can access from your phone. An Interactive session basically means that you have your option of going back between using Terminal as you normally would with Claude Code or using the Remote session. So basically the difference with Server Mode is that on Server Mode you're just using your mobile device to control Claude Code, whereas Interactive you can go back and forth. Finally, if you are already in a Claude Code session and you want to move to Remote, you can use the slash remote control command or slash RC, and this is going to once again display either a URL or QR code that you can use to connect from another device. First impressions were positive. Prominent solopreneur Peter Levils wrote, Claude Remote Control is extremely nice. Can edit on macOS or iOS and Claude app on my production server from anywhere. He basically compared it favorably to an SSH session, which would be another more technically complex way to log into your local device to control it while on the go. Roman Mirzoyan writes, Yesterday I fixed two bugs and then released an app update to the app store without touching my laptop and having a walk for half a day. Now as time has gone on, people started to realize that this was a bigger shift that they might have originally thought. Gagan Suluja writes, Claude Code Remote Control just clicked for me. You kick off a task in the terminal, then pick it up from your phone on a walk. That's not a productivity feature. That's a relationship shift. You stop thinking of it as a tool you operate, and start thinking of it as something you delegate to and check in with. Different mental model entirely. I think that that's right, and I think that most people are still just slowly coming to that realization, because it's one you kind of have to live, not just hear about. Next up, a couple weeks later, we got a different way to interact with Claude from afar. This feature was for Claude Cowork and called Dispatch. Anthropics Felix Riesberg writes, We're shipping a new feature in Claude Cowork as a research preview that I'm excited about. Dispatch. One persistent conversation with Claude that runs on your computer. Message it from your phone, come back to finished work. Felix then went on to explain a little bit further. Because it's Cowork, he writes, Claude runs code in a sandbox on your machine. Your files stay local, you approve what Claude touches before it acts. It feels pretty magical to give Claude a mission on my computer and get occasional updates like creating reports from internal dashboards or finding me a better seat on my next flight. Everything Claude can do on your computer, files, browsers, tools, are reachable from wherever you are. Now, one constraint Felix writes is that your desktop has to be running. Claude Code PM Noah Zweban also talked about dispatch. Coolest abilities, he writes, 1 Send files from local machines so you can work on PowerPoints on the go. Spawn sub-sessions on desktop that you can drill down on. Chat about any local cowork session. In the docs, they explain a little bit more about how this works. Anthropic writes, Instead of starting a new session for each task, you have a single persistent thread with Claude. This thread doesn't reset. Claude retains context from previous tasks, so you can pick up where you left off. Message Claude from your phone on the way to work, then follow up from your desktop when you sit down. It's the same conversation, same context wherever you reach it. When you assign a task, Claude figures out what kind of work is needed and spins up the right session. Development tasks run in Claude Code, knowledge work runs in Cowork. These sessions appear in their respective sidebars. You can click into any session for details or wait for the result in the thread. Claude messages you the outcome. A spreadsheet, a memo, a comparison table, a pull request, rather than showing you every step of the process. You'll get a push notification on your phone when a task is done or when Claude needs your go-ahead. Now, like with remote control, the power users who really started to dig into dispatch found that it was not just a shift in scale, but a shift in kind. Pavel Huren writes, Dispatch didn't fill my dead time. It changed how I structured my day. I went to the jump arena with my kid because I could direct work acing from the sidelines. The model isn't grind during gaps. It's design your day differently because the work runs without you sitting in front of it. He also wrote an article after 48 hours of experimenting. And one thing that he points out is that Dispatch is not Claude Chat on your phone. Dispatch, he writes, is an orchestrator. From a single conversation on your phone, you spawn and manage multiple co-work task sessions running simultaneously on your desktop. Each session runs independently. Its own context, its own file access, its own connectors. Your phone is the command chair. Your desktop does the heavy lifting. Think of the difference between texting someone a request and sitting in a control room with multiple screens. Each screen is a task session running on your desktop. Your phone directs them all from one conversation thread. So what are the types of tasks he did? During morning coffee at home, Pavel started with, Pull the latest competitor updates and summarize changes since last week, as well as draft the sponsor collaboration page using Notion Database. While he was walking the dog, he checked Task 1, the competitor summary. He followed up with, add a comparison table against our current roadmap. The redirect he points out took 10 seconds one-handed. While in the passenger seat with his wife driving, he reviewed the new sponsor Notion page. Too formal, he said, pull the engagement metrics from the last campaign and make the value proposition sharper. He also started Task 3, gap analysis on the article draft. While at the jump arena with his kids, he started working on infographic iterations. Move the icons left, change the color of the third section. Finally went back at his desk, everything was waiting, and he reviewed, adjusted and shipped. Ultimately, he writes the actual direction time across all of these gaps was maybe 25 minutes total. The Claude execution running in parallel was 3 plus hours of work. Ethan Malik also had a positive experience with Dispatch. He writes, after using it a bit, Claude Cowork Dispatch covers 90% of what I was trying to use OpenClaw for, but feels far less likely to upload my entire drive to a malware site. What I like better, he writes, easy, much more stable and safe, existing connectors mean better integration with Gmail, browsers, etc. Very good tool use. What's missing for me? The ability to invite Claude to any channel, the heartbeat and proactivity, and the multiple sessions.