People keep asking for this w/ Codex, too, and I really regret that both labs seem inclined to listen.

If you ask a thinking/research type question in 'Chat' versus 'Work' mode in these products -- say, something complex about politics, or do a multiturn business strategy, or want to work thru a new concept, you get very different answers.

The harness, steering, etc. in the chat/reasoning products is so much better for this type of question (that doesn't require code as a primary substrate).

Even as someone who mainlines like, 7 coding agents at all times, I regret that productivity fever will mean the regression of think-first-act-later AI UX.

How did this new account `vertigoruntime` get three posts on the front page, all in the last day?

- This post

- The DeepMind Institute https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727659

- Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49723408

based on their account submission history they have a 25% hit rate (!) Seems very, very weird.

These kinds of updates always have this romantic scenario of someone having Claude develop a presentation or something on their way to work between multiple devices, which actually feels a little sad and does not align with what happens in my life at all.

Hi, this is my team! Happy to answer any questions.

There's a lot in this launch, but the core idea is to simplify the product while giving users access to more capabilities. You no longer need to know ahead of time how much work a conversation might involve. If you're at your computer, Claude can use your local files and apps. If you close your laptop, Claude can keep working on its own computer.

This launch also lets you use Claude Design, Claude Docs, and Claude Slides directly from conversations. That's possible because we made Artifacts much more powerful: whenever Claude makes you an app, website, design system, or anything else, it can deploy an artifact with multiplayer features and databases.

As many of you probably know from your own work, giving users more power while making the experience simpler is really, really hard. It took many iterations to get to this version. We're far from done, but I expect people will be able to do much more while having to think about it less.

A bit meta, but this is one of the first posts in Anthropic's official blogs I've read that has distinctively Claude-style prose, thought less prominent than usual:

    What Claude makes doesn’t need its own place either.

    Enterprise admins choose when to turn them on

    the frustrating part was deciding where a task belonged

    What they’d started in one also didn’t carry into the other

And the unnecessary school-project level verbosity:

    You can choose how Claude checks in with you. By default,
    Claude asks before taking an action. If you’d rather let it
    keep working and check in only when something needs a closer look,
    you can turn that on. You keep the final say.

Most normal users have no idea whether to choose chat or cowork. This makes sense for 95% of customers.

Is there a mature centralized platform, self hosted, that sync all your “AI stuff” across multiple devices? So regardless of the harness, it sync the api keys, providers, skills, and seasons for starters with other authenticated machines? Say you used codex on macos_1 through this platform, and later you used opencode on linux_3, it syncs everything to the new machine, no ssh to centralized machine, no git, none of that duct tape solutions, which they work but cumbersome.

Nobody really knows how to product-ize any of these LLM interfaces beyond just chat.

They don't want a traditional UI with buttons and forms and labels because they want the interface to be "chat". The problem is that "chat" is tedious. And the turn-based, linear nature of the chat interaction model makes it even more tedious and unproductive.

To Anthropic: I hope you don't merge Claude Code and chat, I like keeping their memory separate.

I'm starting to explore alternative options because Claude has become an awful value proposition. Any suggestions?

Basically DOA in healthcare, even with a BAA I don't want Claude Cowork enabled in our workstations, ever.

Good to see AI providers finally starts understanding how bad was the user experience. This is not just a Claude issue but same issue exists in ChatGPT. While it is in the right direction, there is more to be done. I personally think that they should separate Chat and Coding into two separate apps. Both are completely different use-cases. As a developer, I have need for both but I don't like them in the same app. For example, I consider my chats as knowledge base like Obsidian that I want to keep it organized and browse in the future. On the other hand, once I done a coding task, I don't really need that chat anymore. Having coding tasks in the app feel like polluting my regular chats. This frustration led me build my own Chat-only App https://www.vinaa.ai/ where I keep my regular chats in one place organised into projects and folders incl. the ability to auto-organise chats. App is still in early days and I am experimenting a lot to make it a real AI knowledgebase.

The problem is that knowledge workers just need the simplest way possible to automate their work. Currently I feel like Anthro is overcomplicating this. If I'm an accountant, I want to open Claude App, describe my workflow for balancing some books, then have Claude design a reusable WORKFLOW that it runs whenever I ask. The workflow only needs 2 primitive skills to do anything: /work, and /review. Compose these together with guidance docs into workflows, then workflows and call other workflows. It's all just callable skills.

/balance-books hey claude here's the books. Go balance them

Claude then uses the guidance docs and various subagents to review the books, send off parallel workers with cheap models, then review with a more expensive model. Done in the repeatable, correct order with independent review every time. As new models come out, your workflow structure stays the same. You just delete some prescription from the guidance docs.

https://github.com/DanMcInerney/orchflows

Really excited to try the gsuite replacements, which seems like the bigger announcement than the title suggest

1) If you want to make Claude usable how about addressing the fact that OpenAI 20x lasts all day on Astra, yet Claude 20x pips out in 20 mins of agentic with Fable 5.1, which is totally useless.

And unlike Sol: Opus like yoda, anything for unusable he is.

2) The first AI company to reduce their token pricing such that Astra/Fable can run for less than $150/day from credits would see a 5x usage increase and 20x spend increase from me. It’s currently around $500 for Astra and $5000 for Claude.

3) They seem to recently have addressed the fact that their safeguards were OTT so kudos to them for realising and now Fable is usable for wire and memory level programming.

Just yesterday I experienced this product weirdness -- oh you're in a chat in this project and I can't do that, you need to open a task.

The product management at Anthropic is pretty... nonexistent?

I love this

Claude's mobile app wouldn't show any Cowork initiated conversations, even if those conversations didn't leverage cowork specific features

I hope this doesn’t get confusing like ChatGPT made it.

I feel like Claude has some of the best UX, and hope this doesn’t dilute the experience.

I really appreciated that the users that I administrate had an option where Claude was not going to get carried away and orchestrate workslop, I will have to completely re-write my usage guides after testing how prompts are routed now.

Feels like the same "let us do _all_ of the thinking for you" messaging that Microsoft has with Copilot.

It's funny how they keep trying to add more interfaces and everything keeps coming back to chat. And of course it would, natural language is the simplest interface there is. Anything they add beyond chat, that isn't placed within chat, that isn't some artifact of chat, is friction.

I really hope ChatGPT doesn't follow suit. Chat and Work serve 2 distinct tasks, and unifying Chat and Codex limits will cause the users to avoid using Chat in order to save the tokens for Codex.

That's the natural outcome. AI will eventually collapse into a single, universal entry point, much like Google Search became the default gateway for the web.

Why would anyone install software that the owner himself said is unsafe to use?

It would appear no one else submitted the posts in question, so the most obvious answer is the account is finding interesting articles that no one else has found. It would be one thing if it won out of many dupe posters, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening.

I just have RSS feeds of news in AI circles that may be cool, built an entire tracker around it - helps me pick up new stuff on time !

Totally unrelated but I google'd their username to see if there was a clue, and I had no idea this feed existed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

maybe someone wrote a classifier (or LLM wrapper) to find posts that will rank on hn

They are all valid front page submissions by the looks of them and they appear to be the first ones submitted. It wouldn’t be hard to do if you cared enough to configure notifications for frontier announcements. If someone were using technology to influence submissions or misuse HN, that would be a concern but I don’t see any evidence of that.

To directly answer your question, my guess is they have an alert set up for various places on the internet, and are able to post the links faster than anyone else. Maybe that part is automated.

AI product updates probably tend to rank very well here. If you look at the domains the user is submitting, they’re pretty normal: twitter accounts of tech CEOs, big company blogs, etc.

If I saw a bunch of blogs with affiliate links or landing pages for slop products I’d be more suspicious.

> putting my tinfoil hat on and awaiting for replies

I question all the time what dictates the posts I see on the front page every day, and whether or not it's truly based on organic interest. i wish i could say i up/down vote frequently but i do not and i wonder if that's true for most people.

You can make your post on top in some services by paying 5 dollars on fiver. I asked before about HN, and someone said it is hard to do... Maybe they found a way?

This is a nightmare scenario to me.

"Claude, prepare me a presentation on XYZ."

I get to work, go straight to the meeting room, and pull up what it made to present.

It's barely coherent nonsense. Lots of irrelevant details, buzz words, wrong charts or confusing phrasing. Obviously LLM output.

I read it out.

When I'm done, I get a question about one of Claude's incorrectly inferred details.

The shame instantly kills me.

This is a scenario I've seen play out with coworkers. Except that last part, instead of dying or owning up to the mistake of trusting LLM output they waffle. Their shame circuit is broken.

Because nobody actually knows what anybody else’s job consists of. But everyone is familiar with how jobs work in the ‘romcom job universe’ where workplace stakes are generally driven by ‘I have this really important make-or-break presentation due Friday!’

I suspect it’s because writers don’t normally have jobs and the only time they are ever in offices it’s to deliver a pitch for a project.

"Plan a trip to Italy next month and book the flights"

I see a version of that all the time and would never, ever do it.

I've found basically all of the release presentations are completely irrelevant and seem to target a very narrow subset of the population. They're always reserving something like a restaurant or a sports venue or generating a new slide deck for their business meeting. Perhaps these companies would do better if they could make a use case for regular people. You know, the 90% of the folks out there working normal jobs and not spending infinite money. I don't think I know a single person who has made a restaurant reservation more than once or twice (mostly never) in their entire life. Maybe I'm the weirdo here, but I can't relate to any of these demonstrations.

I'm retired and write code as a hobby, not presentations or docs, but it fits how I use exe.dev to make a code change. I will have a conversation with the AI, then say "Please go ahead" and close my laptop to do something else. Since I use web browsers exclusively for this, I can check on its progress from my phone, tablet, or laptop.

(They have iOS and Android apps too, but I've never bothered to install them.)

I use Claude/opencode and Orca and Hermes across my vpses, Macbook, Linux, and iOS devices. This is exactly how I want to keep working.

weirdly enough, that aligns exactly with my life.

Two years ago, I had no commute, and presentations were tedious ( i was NOT a good google slides user ), I kinda prefer this world for now

It aligns with me pretty well. Not exactly presentations, but it’s great to be able to do stuff on the go when an idea or motivation strikes.

Seriously a trillion dollar company with zero product management expertise.

I do this pretty regularly. It's great.

Just like every demo is some pathetic one shot trash game that nobody would play, or something equally inane.

From a user experience standpoint this sounds like a clear win. Congratulations.

With AI safety top of mind so much lately, I can't help but notice the announcement does not address this.

With "Chat" mode, there was a user expectation that session had only limited capability to produce unexpected side effects, read sensitive files, etc.

With "Cowork" mode, it seems like more powerful capabilities have been on by default, requiring deep settings and safety understanding to disable if desired.

Merging modes feels like it is removing a simple and easy to understand risk management tool. How does the combined mode help users understand, manage and feel confident about what risks they are accepting?

It's not a bad idea, however if Cowork, Designs, Docs and Slides are still different products, it'd be great for the user to know they are being routed to that particular product automatically because of what they were asking for in their prompt.

> Claude Design, Claude Docs, and Claude Slides

Why/when would I ever need any of these? Can't y'all focus on useful features instead?

How are you determining how much oomph Claude gives a particular question? When I ask Claude Chat to e.g. summarize a document, it does this and returns a summary inline, whereas cowork does a bunch of tool calls and intermediate steps, eventually writing a document to disk. How does new claude know how deep to go?

Why is Claude Code still proprietary, while Codex is Open Source? What would it take to fix that? This is a major reason to pick OAI models over Anthropic (because while you can use an open agent with any model, the AI labs charge much more for that interaction style).

I liked the ability to explicitly only chat, without the possibility of Cowork activating since I have never wanted that. It's unclear how I can still guarantee that now.

Will there be a Claude Sheets too? I find myself using Claude to work with spreadsheets more than almost any other document type. It does okay now, but feel like it could be even better, especially with visualizations and formulas.

I have a question about project memory. Last time I tried using Claude to organise my chats into Projects, it turned them into isolated silos. I asked a different chat to refer to what we'd discussed in the other chat, and it said it wasn't allowed to access it.

This was pretty frustrating. By trying to organise my chats, I actively made them worse. ChatGPT at least gives you the option to have either open or closed memory. Is this being considered?

I rarely use Claude or Claude Desktop. Almost 100% of my usage is Claude Code because it ties into all of the private infrastructure I've built around it. I've had decent success using CC for generating Office documents of various formats. It tends to reach for a python script and library to generate them and the output is typically clean and easy to apply a template to. I have had issues where I need to manually modify the files to demonstrate format and style, but that's also something that can built into context after with references to templates.

Where do you see Claude doing better than what I'm seeing with Claude Code in these circumstances? Are there any reasons for me to leave my pretty heavily customized CC environment for the other versions?

As part of all the work being done I really hope the sidebar gets more user control. There is a bunch of stuff that I don't intend to use myself but take up first class space (designer is always there, I never need to bring up artifacts, etc). I'd like to reduce the sidebar to what I use most often.

Specifically around the work UX. Trying to bring up scheduled tasks is really painful and required a lot of clicking around instead of just seeing the task results under my project. I hope this is being looked at.

Lastly, and this is a real nit. Let me turn off the "tips" when stuff is being worked on. I'm already paying, you don't need to force a rotating feature advertisement into the interface.

Can you standardize with all of your tools on a common registry key and settings paradigm and same plugin/skills paradigm and common method for enterprise delivery? It’s a pain in the neck getting all of this set up and deployed throughout the org.

In the web interface, are there any plans to support attaching local directories through File System Access API and accessing internal (as in, not reachable over Internet) MCPs, assuming correct CORS setup, of course?

Thanks for participating in the discussion Felix. A big issue for me - not sure if others suffer from this - is that it’s next to impossible to track work in progress, especially with when there are artefacts involved or reports etc. Things that require multi-day work of back and forth and reflection.

Chat is a horrible interface for this, having to scroll up and down across lengthy conversations to try and pick up a thread.

I’m really sorry but I really fail to understand why this massive push to “chatify” everything. A task with its own context and multiple chats feel like a much better approach to work. Even if the work is spawned from a main chat window - eg “Claude we need to work on XYZ” and it creates a task to track this piece of work.

Further, recurring tasks again are really really hard to manage with a chat interface - which of the 10 chats has that question that the recurring task raised?!

And of course all this UX debt will likely stand in your way of building reactive items - ie spawning a task in response to some outside event. Think an inbound email being handled by a prompt that triggers a task and creates a draft response ready for my review and approval. Very hard to do with chat windows.

this is good change for ux. thanks

I'm operating Team accounts, are there changes on how org-wide skill/plugin get loaded and used?

I don't think it's that anyone wants the interface to be chat. I think it's that the underlying technology is inherently words in and words out. It's similar to how devices with capacitive screens are most naturally going to support tapping, dragging, and pinching.

The great confusion for Anthropic and OAI is how to break out from pure chat without signalling you in fact intend to eat all of your customer's business too.

It’s not surprising.

Technology folks don’t really understand people and what they need.

This always happens. This is why woz needed Steve.

Steve Jobs is sorely missed tbh. For all the shit he got - he was a true visionary. He lived at the intersection of technology and the humanities… he kept preaching this. And now we are seeing why.

This has been my ongoing gripe. Someone put chat in front of a transformer model. It exploded like all prior versions of “AI chat” did. Now what?

The moment someone figures out a new modality for LLMs is when we’ll see the next hockey stick.

One thing I would like is a tree-like chat structure like reddit / HN. Many times I abandon the direction things have gone but would like to resume at some ancestor or sibling response.

Before OpenAI dropped ChatGPT, nobody knew chat would be such a hit. Several labs had versions of these things, Google engineers were getting finessed by a rudimentary model just like in the movie Ex Machina that came out 10 years prior which was satirizing Google

But I don't agree that they aren't product-ized. There are many applications doing calls to LLMs behind the scenes and are hits, leveraging structured data very heavily and not having conversations with users at all. I would say that there is a predictable scope creep from executives to surface a conversational aspect though. We need to bring representation to that so we can point to some other best practice to push back

IMO no one knows what LLMs are capable of yet and the goal post keeping moving every few months that building any specific UIs right now risks rendering them obsolete or too slow.

e.g. We went from somewhat smarter code autocomplete, to asking chatgpt copy paste, to cli agent running inside your project, managing session, to GUI to manage that, to projects where you talk to a "Chief of Staff" agent that manages other sessions, to who knows what's next.

I think the right interfaces for LLMs right now need to be very simple and easy to change/evolve. And chat still seems to be the best default solution.

We’re working on this problem at my company. All of our competitors have churned out a bunch of generic chat based agents (basic harness with a few tools connected and different system prompts) to do basic stuff you’d used to do from a wizard or even just a couple of buttons in a form. We’re steering away from this by building full ‘surface’ agents with A2UI and an initial surface message. The users just see a normal looking web application but under the hood it’s all driven by a harness. UI updates are effectively just new events received by the client. Events are either generated by an LLM directly, or deterministically - it’s up to the dev.

Do you know that you can have multiple chats at the same time?

Chat is only tedious because it’s slow. If models responded in 300ms it would be the ideal interface.

"Chat" makes it feel more like you're talking to a human. They need people to believe AGI is imminent when using the product.