# Claude Chat vs Cowork vs Code: cheat sheet

From my weekly AI webinar (genial-agency.com).

## The rule of thumb

Start in Chat. Move to Cowork when you need your local files or automation. Move to Code when you need scale, API keys or outside services. Everything you can do in Chat also works in Cowork and Code.

## Level 1: Claude Chat

Use it for:
- Web questions, drafting, rewording, presentations
- Research (only available in Chat): large reports from online data, such as looking up a company, events, or writing a detailed tutorial for yourself
- Interactive diagrams (Claude cannot generate images, it builds diagrams with code)
- Styles: learning, concise, explanatory, formal, or your own
- Projects: one silo per client or topic, with custom instructions and files
- Artifacts: small web apps that can have AI inside them
- Claude in Chrome: let Claude control your browser from the chat

It cannot: work with files on your computer.

## Level 2: Claude Cowork

Everything in Chat except Research, plus:
- Works inside one folder you choose (and only that folder)
- Organize downloads or your desktop, clean old spreadsheets, analyze local files
- Scheduled tasks (daily, weekly, every two days...)
- Dispatch: scan a QR code with your phone to control it remotely
- Plugins: install ready-made libraries of skills
- Ideas section (the bulb icon) for examples of what others do

Keep in mind:
- Your computer must stay on for scheduled tasks and Dispatch
- It can only reach apps listed in its Connectors tab
- It cannot use API keys or write code that talks to outside services
- Not suited to scraping large amounts of data (fifty plus entries)

## Level 3: Claude Code

Move here when you need:
- Large data (for example a database with ten thousand rows stored somewhere else)
- API keys and connections to services that are not in the Connectors tab
- Complex scheduled tasks that gather and process data from many apps
- Changes to something that already exists (a codebase, a system)

Useful commands (type / to see them):
- /cost: how much the session has cost
- /init: reads the folder and creates a claude.md file with your project context
- /insights: a report on how you use Claude Code and how to improve

Dispatch also works here, limited to one conversation.

## Skills, connectors, plugins

- Skill: a reusable workflow. A folder with a skill.md text file, plus optional files and code.
- Connector: one-to-one link between Claude and one app (Notion, Gmail, Drive, Canva...).
- Plugin: one-to-many. A library of skills (and connectors) around one theme, like marketing or sales.

## Prompts from the webinar

Turn any conversation into a skill (then click Save Skill):

```
Now, I want you to turn all of this into a skill.
```

Set up an automation after running a task once in Cowork:

```
Hey, Claude, how can I actually schedule this?
```

A morning report:

```
Every single morning, I want you to go into this application, this application, this application, fetch me all of that information, run this every morning at nine thirty AM.
```

Find out what Claude Code needs to build a system:

```
What would you need from me in order to be able to build that system?
```

Map a big workspace so Claude stops wasting tokens:

```
This is the workspace. Go map it out. Get as much information as you can.
```

```
Can you now ask me questions to be able to organize and create a map that you will always use whenever I ask you to work on a project?
```