The AI model is designed to ask for clarification when it's uncertain about a task, a practice Anthropic calls "reverse solicitation." This prevents the agent from making incorrect assumptions and potentially harmful actions, building user trust and ensuring better outcomes.
Anthropic employs a bifurcated product strategy. Claude Cowork is designed for simplicity to appeal to a broad, non-technical audience. In contrast, Claude Code is built with extensive customizability (skills, hooks, permissions) to satisfy expert engineers who love to "hack their tools."
To get the best results from an AI agent, provide it with a mechanism to verify its own output. For coding, this means letting it run tests or see a rendered webpage. This feedback loop is crucial, like allowing a painter to see their canvas instead of working blindfolded.
Claude Cowork is not a separate technology but a user-friendly interface built directly on the existing Claude Code agent and SDK. This strategy makes a powerful, technical tool accessible to a broader, non-technical audience, effectively expanding its total addressable market.
The creator of Claude Code expects users to "abuse" the new Cowork tool by using it in ways it wasn't designed for. This user-led discovery is seen as essential for finding a platform's true potential, much like how Uber emerged unexpectedly from the App Store.
Teams maintain a shared `Claude.md` text file in their Git repo. Anytime the AI errs, they add corrections or context to this file. This acts as a constantly improving, team-wide knowledge base that teaches the AI how to work correctly within their specific project, creating a compounding effect.
The creator of Claude Code's workflow is no longer about deep work on a single task. Instead, he kicks off multiple AI agents ("clods") in parallel and "tends" to them by reviewing plans and answering questions. This "multi-clotting" approach makes him more of a manager than a doer.
For experienced users of Claude Code, the most critical step is collaborating with the AI on its plan. Once the plan is solid, the subsequent code generation by a model like Opus 4.5 is so reliable that it can be auto-accepted. The developer's job becomes plan architect, not code monkey.
It's counterintuitive, but using a more expensive, intelligent model like Opus 4.5 can be cheaper than smaller models. Because the smarter model is more efficient and requires fewer interactions to solve a problem, it ends up using fewer tokens overall, offsetting its higher per-token price.