Claude Desktop Tour: Chat, Cowork, and Code

The Claude Desktop app isn't just one tool. It's actually three. Today I'm going to show you which ones we're going to concentrate on, which ones matter, and what we're going to ignore. First, you need to install the desktop application. It's different than the web application, and as you're going to see, it has a lot more power than just going to claude.ai. Go to claude.com/download, or you can click the icon for "Get apps and extensions" and download the desktop application from there. There are several ways to get it, and you'll install it just like any other application. On a Mac, you drag it into your Applications folder. On a PC, you walk through the installation script. After you've logged in, you'll end up with a screen that looks like this. As you can see, I've logged into my business account, the personal account I use to run my general practice. Once you have that, we can go into the desktop app. You'll notice it has three tabs: Chat, Cowork, and Code. That's what we're looking at today, an overview of each. The first one is the Chat tab. This is probably the one you're most familiar with. It's what you've likely done the most, whether with Claude or other LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok: chatting back and forth with the model. It has a searchable list of all your past conversations in Recents, along with pins. There's also an incognito toggle. If you want a conversation that doesn't pull information from your previous chats and doesn't contribute to future chats, this is the place. That's different than whether training data is turned on, and we'll cover that in another video when we go over settings. The next thing is the Projects folder. Projects bundle chats with shared context, files, and custom instructions. You might have one project per client, per group, or per initiative. Claude remembers the context inside that project so you don't have to re-explain. It also lets you give it context like files or folders. We'll talk about that in other videos. Next is Artifacts in the side panel. This is where Claude builds standalone work products, like documents and tools, that you can edit, iterate on, and share. It's something you watch happen live. You also get the Customize area. This is where we'll go over a lot of the different ways we can update and create customizations inside Claude. Over here, we have the ability to switch between models. We can also dictate or have a conversation in voice mode. We have our different connectors, along with different modes and settings. We also have context and memory preferences we can set. Now, the Cowork tab. This is a different paradigm. Think of it this way: Chat answers questions, and Cowork finishes work. Cowork is an autonomous group of agents that work on your computer. It can read and write local files. It can execute multi-step tasks, with or without you supervising every step. Even more, it can automatically run recurring tasks on a schedule. You'll see the task list in the sidebar. You can choose between scheduled tasks, pinned tasks, and recent things you've worked on. You can work on something together inside a project. You can set it to ask before acting, where Claude pauses for your approval on each action, or let it work without pausing. You can choose which model it uses for which level of complexity, and you can give it folder access. Cowork also has its own set of projects. Before we jump into that, the key thing this enables: Cowork can start working on your computer, on your behalf, to do certain tasks. We'll go deeper into that later. It has its own project folder structure. You can give it folder access where it can read, figure out what's relevant, and save finished work back to specific places on your computer. It can connect to tools like Google Drive to save and pull data. It can create Skills, which are reusable playbooks Claude uses for repeated workflows. This is the backbone of work that becomes repeatable, the way it would with a virtual assistant or another employee. Then there are plugins, capabilities Claude doesn't have on its own that you can add from the Cowork interface through Customize, where you can create skills, connect apps, and browse plugins, connectors, and skills. We'll do deeper dives into those. It also has browser use, so you can connect Cowork to your browser and work through Claude in Chrome. And it runs inside a contained space: it can read, create, and edit files within the folders you share, but it can't access anything outside of them without your permission. The last thing is the Code tab, and this is a place where we won't be spending any time in our sessions. Unless you're an engineer shipping software, you can ignore this tab entirely. Everything you need lives in Chat and Cowork. It should be noted that the same engine that runs Cowork runs Code, so you're not missing out on anything. It's the same engine with a different skin, designed for software development, while Cowork is designed to be a co-worker living alongside you. Think of this as a guided quick tour of the Claude desktop application. We'll go into deeper aspects of each throughout future videos.