Welcome back to Watch Me AI
If you're new here, welcome! Watch Me AI is where I share practical ways to use AI in your work and life. Here are a couple of past issues to get you started: How I turn 1 meeting into 10 assets and How I'm using AI to plan my 2026.
If you've been anywhere near tech LinkedIn or Twitter lately, you've probably seen people losing their minds over Claude Code, Anthropic's tool that lets developers build entire apps by talking to Claude.
But most of us aren't developers. So I've been watching from the sidelines, wondering when the rest of us would get something like that.
Two weeks ago, we did.
Anthropic launched Claude Cowork and I've been deep in it ever since. Today I want to give you the honest rundown: what it is, what it's actually good for, and whether it's worth paying for.
What Cowork actually is
Regular Claude Chat is a conversation. You ask, it answers. You're still doing the work.
Cowork is different. You give Claude a task, and it goes and does it.
It can browse the web. It can open apps. It can read your Google Drive. It can take screenshots, click buttons, fill out forms. It can chain multiple steps together without you babysitting each one.
It's less like a chatbot and more like an employee.
AI that can browse the web and take actions has existed for a while. But it required specialized software and a lot of patience. This is the first time it's been this easy, this powerful, and inside a tool you're probably already using. That's what makes this a big deal. Anyone can do this now.
Let me make this tangible
I know that sounds abstract. So let me show you what this actually looks like with a few real examples from the past week.
1. Auditing my free guides
I have a folder in Google Drive full of free guides I've created over the past year. Things like "Getting Started with Lovable" and "How to Use AI for Meeting Follow-ups."
The problem is, AI tools change fast. Some of those guides are probably outdated but going through each one, researching what's changed, and deciding what needs updating has been sitting on my to-do list for months.
So I handed it to Cowork.
I gave it access to my Google Drive folder and said: review each guide, research whether the product has changed, and tell me which ones need updates and what specifically should change.
It opened each guide. It went to the product websites to check for new features. It came back with a prioritized list: high priority updates, low priority, no changes needed.
Then I told it to implement the changes. And it did. It went back into each guide and made the updates itself.
That would have taken me an entire afternoon. Cowork did it while I was on a call.
2. Reviewing and updating my website
I built my personal website in Lovable. It's been a few months since I really looked at it, and I wanted to make sure it was optimized for my current goals: selling the Playbook and booking consulting clients.
So I told Cowork: go to my website, review every page, and give me recommendations for what to improve.
It went through the site page by page, took screenshots, and came back with a detailed analysis.
Then I told it to open Lovable and actually make the changes.
It did. It opened Lovable, typed in the prompts to update my homepage copy, and hit send. I just watched.
3. Updating a massive conference list
A client came to me with a spreadsheet of 500+ conferences. Each row had a URL, and the dates and locations needed to be updated for this year.
Doing this manually would be brutal. Open URL, find the 2026 dates, copy them over, repeat 500 times. That's hours of mind-numbing work.
So I gave it to Cowork. Go to each URL, find the updated dates and location, and fill in the spreadsheet.
It just started going. Opening each site, finding the information, updating the row, moving to the next one. It even added a "changes" column so we could review what it did, and color-coded rows based on the type of change and its confidence level. Most were marked high confidence, and when we spot-checked, it was highly accurate.
This is the kind of task that used to require a VA or an intern. Now it's a prompt. (And yes, this is exactly the kind of thing I help clients figure out.)
A few tips if you try it
Use Opus 4.5. It's the newest model and noticeably better than the others. You might burn through credits faster, but the quality difference is worth it.
Create a local folder. Cowork works best when it has a folder on your desktop it can save files to. I just made one called "Claude" and point it there.
Be specific about your goals. The more context you give (what you're trying to achieve, what success looks like, any constraints) the better the output. Treat it like you're briefing a new employee.
So when do you use Cowork vs. regular Chat?
The line is blurry. And getting blurrier.
Something I've noticed in the past week or so is that Cowork-style capabilities are showing up in regular Claude Chat. Like web browsing, file creation, and multi-step reasoning. Just this morning, Chat used web browsing to add new tags in Kit so I can better segment my subscribers.
My prediction: Anthropic is going to merge Chat, Cowork, and Code into one interface eventually (which in AI time likely means next week).
My rule right now: start in Chat and see how far you can get.
Graduate to Cowork when you need Claude to:
- Browse multiple websites and pull information
- Access files in your Google Drive or desktop
- Do multi-step projects where each step depends on the last
- Take action inside other apps
Which means even if you're not paying for Max, you should start learning how to work this way. Giving Claude tasks instead of questions. Letting it browse and research. Thinking of it as an employee rather than a tool.
This is where AI is heading. The sooner you get comfortable with it, the better.
Is it worth $100/month?
For me, yes. Easily.
The time I've saved on the projects above, plus a dozen others, has been worth way more than $100. And it's enabling me to do things I simply wouldn't have done otherwise, like that guides audit.
That said, it's still buggy. I've had days where it barely worked. It's improving fast (noticeably better than even a week ago), but it's not a polished product yet.
If you're curious but not sure, try it for one month and see how much you use it. If you're not getting value, cancel.
And if $100 feels like too much right now, keep using Chat. A lot of this capability is coming there too.
Want more workflows like this?
The AI Business Playbook is full of deep dives on tools like Cowork and Lovable, plus step-by-step workflows for presentation creation, meeting follow-ups, business development, and more. The kind of stuff that saves you 5+ hours a week.
Get the Playbook here →
And if you want to go deeper on Cowork specifically, I put together a one-pager with tips and use cases from last week's live session.
Get it here →
Until next time,
Mollie
