AI for Claude Chat vs Co-work vs Code Webinar April 9th

This session is a complete walkthrough of Anthropic's three Claude tools: Claude Chat, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code. If you have ever gotten frustrated with one of them and dropped the whole ecosystem, this is for you, because in most cases the problem is not the tool, it is that nobody told you which one fits your use case. I go through each tier live, show what it can and cannot do, and end with the exact line that separates each one from the next.

Why people mix up the three tools (4:20)

Anthropic is fantastic at building tools and extremely bad at explaining which feature you should use for which use case. There are so many redundant things at this point that people end up asking: is a skill an automation? Is a skill a markdown file? What are plugins? What are connectors? I was talking with people on LinkedIn who told me a tool was trash, and when I asked how they were using it, the answer made the problem obvious. They were just using the wrong instance for the job.

So the plan for this session was simple: go through Chat, then Cowork, then Code, and make the boundaries between them impossible to miss.

Claude Chat is the foundation (5:28)

A lot of people say Claude is the best tool ever, and I agree it is fantastic, but not for the reason most people give. Every major model out there, whether it is Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, or Mistral, is sufficiently intelligent. Intelligence is no longer the reason you pick one model over another, and the benchmarks back that up. Claude may communicate more clearly, but that is communication skill, not extra intelligence.

What actually matters is how these brains get connected to the real world: your email, your local files, your AI note taker. That ecosystem of connections is why Claude became the go-to tool.

On the basics, the Chat experience looks exactly like ChatGPT: one big chat box where you ask anything. Claude has a few quirks though. It is the only major player that cannot generate images, but it generates diagrams instead, through code, and those diagrams can even be interactive. I had it draw a waterfall live in the session. It will not win a design award, but if you need to explain something to someone, an interactive diagram is a genuinely useful output.

You also get styles, which change how Claude talks to you. Learning mode takes the time to explain everything it does; there are concise, explanatory, and formal options, and you can create your own. Web search is on by default everywhere now, but Research is exclusive to the chat mode. Research is what you use for huge reports on online data.

My three main use cases for Chat (13:47): looking up information on a given company or event, building very detailed tutorials for myself, and one-shot research jobs like ranking everything I plan to watch this year. Big volumes of information that need digesting into a massive report.

Connectors and Claude in Chrome (13:55)

The Connectors section is where Claude pulls ahead of ChatGPT. I have mine connected to Notion, Gmail, and Google Drive, and in the session I asked Claude to fetch what is in my Notion, which it did directly from the chat. In the Add Connector list you will find project management tools, design tools, coding tools like Linear, Hugging Face for AI development, and many more. These are official connectors built by the applications themselves, which is why the performance is so good. You can both read information from these tools and modify it, without switching tabs.

Then there is Claude in Chrome. With the Chrome extension installed, Claude can take control of your browser. I demoed it live: I told Claude to go to YouTube and search for music by Gorillaz, and you could see the orange outline around the window showing that Claude was driving. The practical version of this: ask it to check LinkedIn for people who have not replied to your messages in the last 24 hours, or to work through websites that have no connector.

Skills, projects, plugins, and artifacts (17:49)

Skills get hyped as a game changer, but here is the honest version: a skill is a reusable workflow, something we have all been doing since ChatGPT existed. Concretely, a skill is a folder. Inside that folder there is a file called skill.md, a text file that describes what the skill does. The folder can also contain more folders and even code that the skill uses.

Creating one is easy. In the session I asked Claude to write a poem, turn it into a one-slide PowerPoint presentation, and then I said: turn this into a skill. That is it. Now I have a reusable poem presentation skill I can save, activate, deactivate, or uninstall. Skills can get genuinely complex: pull leads from LinkedIn, sync them into a database, generate the report, send the email. And that is just the chat version.

Projects work the same way as in ChatGPT: big folders where you load documents, PDFs, presentations, and everything gets pulled into Claude's context. The key feature is custom instructions per project. I created a demo project live with the instruction to always answer in Spanish, and it did. You can give each project a persona, like an expert project manager in agile methodology, and keep one silo per client or per team so no other information leaks in.

Plugins (25:09) are the piece people confuse most. A plugin is just a library of skills around one theme. A marketing plugin might contain an SEO analysis skill, a draft presentation skill, and so on. Remember the difference: a connector is one-to-one with an application, a plugin is one-to-many, plus maybe some skills.

Artifacts are more niche: small web applications Claude builds for you, and they can have AI inside them. I generated flashcards live from an Anthropic example, and the results were pretty slick for a few prompts.

Claude Cowork: local files plus automation (27:32)

Claude Cowork does everything Claude Chat does, except Research, and adds one fundamental difference: it is connected to a folder on your computer. You pick the folder, Cowork gets access to exactly that folder and nothing else, for security reasons. I pointed it at my YouTube folder and asked what was inside, and it gave me a full breakdown of my videos, webinar series, and MakerSchool sessions. If your desktop or downloads folder is a mess, this is how you get Claude to organize your local files, or clean up Excel sheets that have been lying around for years.

On top of that you get two features Chat does not have. Scheduled tasks let Cowork run something every day, every week, whatever cadence you want. Live in the session I asked for the latest AI news, then had Claude set that up as a skill plus a scheduled task that runs every morning. Five minutes of setup, and every morning you have a report ready. Connect it to your CRM or your to-do application and you get a morning digest across everything you track. One caveat: your computer has to be on.

The second feature is Claude Dispatch (28:16): leave your computer on at home, scan a QR code with your phone, and you can keep controlling Cowork at a distance.

There is also the Ideas section, the little bulb on the left, with examples of what other people do: meeting follow-ups, analyzing Google Drive documents, turning documents into presentations, catching up on Slack, email, and calendar.

Where Cowork stops: it cannot create external connections beyond what is in the Connectors tab, and it does not let you use API keys. And if you want to scrape the web at any real volume, say fifty plus entries, Cowork is not the tool. That is the moment you transition to Claude Code.

Where Cowork ends and Claude Code begins (40:39)

Here is the ladder. Claude Chat is level one: things on the web, normal thinking problems, drafting, rewording, presentations. The line between Chat and Cowork is local files: Cowork works with your local files, adds scheduled tasks, remote control through Dispatch, and plugins. The next barrier is the code barrier. You move from Cowork to Claude Code when you want to do things at scale, and when your workflow needs code that communicates with an external service. Cowork already uses code internally to analyze your files, but the moment that code needs to talk to an outside application, Cowork says it does not have the right to do that. Claude Code does.

Claude Code inside the desktop app (43:17)

Claude Code used to live only in the terminal or as an IDE extension. Now it is inside the same desktop application, and it works nearly as well as the terminal, which keeps a few exclusive features. If you are a complete beginner, this is a fantastic way to start.

Same pattern as Cowork: pick a folder, ask questions about it. But now you can go further. I asked Claude Code live: I want to analyze my videos one by one using Gemini, what would you need from me to build that system? It read the folder, then came back with exactly the right questions: you need an API key from Google AI Studio, where do you want to store the results, should I send Gemini the video file or the script and description? Because it was connected to my Notion, it already knew it could store things there. You describe the system you want, and it gives you the step-by-step path to build it.

Scheduled tasks exist here too, with the difference that they can connect to external applications, so a single scheduled task can gather and process data from ten or twenty tools. Dispatch works as well, limited to one conversation at a time. Skills work the same way as in Chat, except they live inside the folder you are working in.

Then there are slash commands (48:06). Type slash and you get your skills plus predefined commands: /cost tells you what the session cost, /init reads everything in your folder and creates a CLAUDE.md file, which holds the extra context Claude needs to truly understand your project. And /insights reads through your conversation history and generates a full report: how many messages, what you worked on, which languages you code in, plus a grading of how well you use Claude Code and concrete tips to improve. I ran it live and got a dashboard back.

Q&A highlights

Alexander, a cloud solution architect, asked whether he should use Chat for defining architecture designs, for example AWS solutions for a client (12:38). My answer: Chat is fine for researching how to architect a system from zero, but if you have to modify things that already exist, use Claude Code connected to the actual system. It will give you a much more detailed response because it can see what is really there.

He also shared that he is building a second brain in Obsidian with skills and workflows, and that tokens burn fast when Claude reads the wrong documents across projects. My tip: before you start working in a workspace with many project folders, have Claude Code map the entire structure first, then ask it to build a map it will always use when you ask it to work on a project. I did exactly this with my Notion workspace: I told Claude Code to fetch every database and every page. It took about 30 minutes, and it works.

If this cleared up the difference between Chat, Cowork, and Code for you, there is a new session every week. Browse all the recordings on the webinars page.