Why Anthropic Thinks AI Should Have Its Own Computer — Felix Rieseberg of Claude Cowork & Claude Code Desktop

**Alessio** (0:06)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. Our first one in the new studio at Kernel. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swix, editor of Latent Space.

**swyx** (0:15)
Yeah, so nice to be here. Thanks to TJ, Alessio, Allen, helping to set everything up. It looks beautiful. We even have the logo outside.

**Alessio** (0:22)
Yeah, it's kind of nice.

**Felix Rieseberg** (0:23)
It's like really nice, right? When you walk in here as a guest, you're like, ah, this is a serious production. You like feel it immediately.

**swyx** (0:29)
Yeah. Felix, you've been... You're currently product manager of Cowork or...
I really lead. And lead, yeah. The identities are kind of vague. Member technical staff.

**Felix Rieseberg** (0:41)
I know. Member technical staff is like the official title we'll carry around forever.

**swyx** (0:45)
Yeah. I recently kind of wanted... Like we've been kind of obsessed. I've been using it a lot, even for managing Latent Space. Like Cowork helps me upload videos and like title things and like edits and everything. It's like really amazing.

**Alessio** (0:58)
Cool. He's had multiple times Cowork as a GI in the group chat.

**swyx** (1:01)
Yeah. So we have a second channel for Latent Space TV.
And basically this is our Discord meetup. And we have like Claude Cowork, it might be AGI. I don't know if we have uploaded it yet, but one of the sessions was like a Claude Cowork thing.

**Felix Rieseberg** (1:20)
I would love to see it. Like I'm so curious. Like one of the most fun parts of my job is that I constantly see the weird things that people use Cowork for, because it's obviously like very hard for us to actually design for specific use cases. We do, but like every single person who's like most amazed is usually amazed about a thing that I didn't even expect Cowork would be good at. We have a new designer and it's one of the first small tasks. I was like, hey, we need like a new emoji for Cowork for our internal stack. It's like a pretty small thing. I said, can you please do it? And he drew an SVG and just gave it to Cowork and was like, can you animate this emoji? And now it has like this beautiful loopy animation. And I mean, I think obviously this goes down to like, it turns out you can do more things with code than you expected. But it's like that kind of stuff that is really fun to me. So long story short, I would love to see like the kind of things you're doing.

**swyx** (2:06)
I'll pull it up. I'll pull it up. Yeah. But before we get into it, I think I always want to start with like a top level. What is Claude Cowork for people who haven't heard of it, haven't tried it out?

**Felix Rieseberg** (2:17)
Okay. Real quick, Claude Cowork is a user-friendly version of Claude Code. The way it basically works is we have Claude Code, and for us, fairly impressive agent harness that over December, we noticed more and more people are using either, even though they're not technical, they're not at home in the terminal, or they are at home in the terminal, but they started using Claude Code for non-coding workloads, like managing expenses or filling out receipts, or organizing a knowledge base. There was a big obsidian moment that a lot of people liked, and we wanted to capitalize on that, but also bring this capability to people who are not terminal native, and who might not know how to brew install something. So Cowork is Claude Code running in a virtual machine with a little bit of padding, a little bit more guardrails, making it a little safer, a little bit more convenient for people who don't want to first open up the terminal when they go to work.

**swyx** (3:12)
It's interesting that it's kind of pitched that way as a more user-friendly thing, because I always feel like it, to me, I treat it as like why I'm familiar with Claude Code. Like we did a Claude Code episode a year ago, but this one is like even more power user tools because it kind of integrates much better with like Claude in Chrome and in all the other tooling. But like maybe that's like a perception thing, right?

**Felix Rieseberg** (3:35)
No, honestly, I don't think you're wrong. This is like a thing I've been thinking a lot about for like the last two weeks.

**swyx** (3:40)
So people when they say user-friendly, it's like, oh, it's the dumbed down version. But no, actually, this is the superset.