Claude Cowork came out of an accident. Felix and the Anthropic team noticed something interesting with Claude Code: many users were using it primarily for all kinds of messy knowledge work instead of coding. Even technical builders would use it for lots of non-technical work. Even more shocking, Claude cowork wrote itself. With a team of humans simply orchestrating multiple claude code instances, the tool was ready after a brief week and a half. This isn’t Felix’s first rodeo with impactful and playful desktop apps. He’s helped ship the Slack desktop app and is a core maintainer of Electron the open-source software framework used for building cross-platform desktop applications, even putting Windows 95 into an Electron app that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. In this episode, Felix joins us to unpack why execution has suddenly become cheap enough that teams can “just build all the candidates” and why the real frontier in AI products is no longer better chat, but trusted task execution. He also shares why Anthropic is betting on local-first agent workflows, why skills may matter more than most people realize, and how the hardest questions ahead are about autonomy, safety, portability, and the changing shape of knowledge work itself. We discuss * Felix’s path: Slack desktop app, Electron, Windows 95 in JavaScript, and now building Claude Cowork at Anthropic * What Claude Cowork actually is: a more user-friendly, VM-based version of Claude Code designed to bring agentic workflows to non-terminal-native users

* Why “user-friendly” does not mean “less powerful”: Cowork as a superset product, much like how VS Code initially looked simpler than Visual Studio but became more hackable and extensible * Anthropic’s prototype-first culture: why Cowork was built in 10 days using many pre-existing internal pieces, and how internal prototypes shaped the final product * Why execution is getting cheap: the shift from long memos, specs, and debate toward rapidly building multiple candidates and choosing based on reality instead of theory * The local debate: why Felix thinks Silicon Valley is undervaluing the local computer, and why putting Claude “where you work” is often more powerful * Why Claude gets its own computer: the VM as both a safety boundary and a capability unlock, letting Claude install tools, run scripts, and work more independently without constant approval * Safety through sandboxing: why “approve every command” is not a real long-term UX, and how virtual machines create a middle ground between uselessly safe and dangerously autonomous * How Cowork differs from Claude Code: coding evals vs. knowledge-work evals, different system-prompt tradeoffs, longer planning horizons, and heavier use of planning and clarification tools * Why skills matter: simple markdown-based instructions as a lightweight abstraction layer for reusable workflows, personalized automation, and portable agent behavior * Skills vs. MCPs: why Felix is increasingly interested in file-based, text-native interfaces that tell the model what to do, rather than forcing everything through rigid tool schemas * The portability problem: why personal skills should move across agent products, and the unresolved tension between public reusable workflows and private user-specific context * Real use cases already happening today: uploading videos, organizing files, handling taxes, managing calendars, debugging internal crashes, analyzing finances, and automating repetitive browser workflows * Why AI products should work with your existing stack: Anthropic’s bias toward integrating with Chrome, Office, and existing workflows instead of rebuilding every app from scratch * Computer use one year later: how much better it has gotten, why vision plus browser context is such a superpower, and why letting Claude see the thing it is working on changes everything * Why many “AI verticals” may get compressed: specialized wrappers may matter in the short term, but better general models and stronger primitives could absorb a lot of narrow use cases * The future of junior work: Felix’s concerns about entry-level roles, labor-market disruption, and whether AI can compress early-career learning into denser simulated experience * Why Waterloo grads stand out: internships, shipping experience, and learning how real teams build products versus purely theoretical academic preparation * The agentic future of the desktop: what it means for Claude to have its own computer, whether AI should act on your machine or a remote one, and how intimacy with personal data changes the product design space * Why Electron still mattered: shipping Chromium as a controlled rendering stack, the limits of OS-native webviews, and why browser engines remain one of the great software abstractions * Anthropic’s Labs mentality: wild internal experiments, half-broken future-looking prototypes, and the broader effort to move users from asking questions to delegating increasingly long and valuable tasks * Why the endgame is not just more capability, but more independence: teaching users to trust AI with bigger scopes of work, for longer durations, with fewer interventions Felix Rieseberg * X: * LinkedIn: * Website: Anthropic * Website: Full Video Pod Timestamps 00:00 — Cheap execution and building all the candidates00:44 — Intro in the new Kernel studio02:47 — What Claude Cowork is04:18 — Why user-friendly can be more powerful05:33 — How Anthropic built Cowork07:09 — Prototype-first product development08:00 — Why local computers still matter09:20 — Skills, primitives, and platform leverage12:13 — Cowork’s architecture: VM + Chrome + system prompt15:38 — Felix’s own bug-fixing Cowork workflows17:38 — Local-first agents20:16 — Evals, planning, and knowledge-work optimization23:14 — What Anthropic means by evals24:21 — Scaffolding, tools, and why skills matter27:44 — Demo: YouTube uploads and self-generated skills31:03 — Calendar automation and cleaning your desktop34:47 — Browser context and why DOM access matters37:47 — Skills portability and plugins44:36 — Which AI categories survive?46:19 — Junior jobs, simulated work, and labor disruption52:00 — Gradual takeoff vs big-bang takeoff53:42 — Finance, taxes, and enterprise verticals56:24 — Vision and the improvement in computer use57:31 — Why Claude writes its own scripts58:06 — Should Claude have its own computer?1:01:26 — Windows 95 in JavaScript1:03:19 — VM tradeoffs and sandbox design1:07:23 — Approval fatigue and safe delegation1:11:18 — The future of Cowork1:12:27 — What comes next for agentic knowledge work1:15:13 — Electron, Chromium, and desktop software lessons1:22:16 — Multiplayer agents and coworker-to-coworker workflows1:26:05 — Anthropic Labs and closing thoughts Transcript Alessio: Hey everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast, our first one in the new studio. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I’m joined by swyx, editor of Latent Space. swyx: Yeah, so nice to be here. Thanks to, uh, TJ, Alessio, Allen helping to set everything up. It looks beautiful. We even have the logo outside. Yeah, kind. Felix: It’s like really nice, right? When you walk in here as a guest, you’re like, ah, this is a serious production. You’re like, feel it immediately. swyx: Yeah. Felix, you’ve been, you’re, you’re currently a product manager of Cowork or, Felix: uh, really Technic swyx: Eng. Yeah. The, the identities are kind of vague member technical staff. Felix: I know member staff is like, the official title will carry around forever. swyx: Yeah. I basically kind of wanted, like we’ve been. Kinda obsessed. I, I’ve been using it a lot, even for managing latent space. Like, uh, cowork helps me upload videos and like title things and like edit and everything. It’s, it’s like really amazing. Alessio: Cool. He said multiple times Cowork has said gi in the group track. swyx: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so we have a second, uh, we have a second channel, uh, for latent space tv. Uh, and I, uh, and uh, we basically, this is our Discord meetup. Um, and I I, we have like Claude Coworks, it might be a GI, I don’t know if we, we have, uh, uploaded it yet, but one of the sessions was like a, like a Claude cowork thing. Felix: I, you have to see, I would love to see it. Like, I’m so curious, like one of the most fun parts of my job is like constantly see the weird things people use Cowork for because it’s obviously like very hard for us to actually design for specific use cases we do. But like every single person who’s like most amazed is usually amazed about a thing that I didn’t even expect cowork would be good at. Um, we have a new designer and it’s one of the first small tasks. I was like, Hey, we need like a new emoji for cowork for our internal stock. It’s like a pretty small thing. I like, can you please do it? And he drew an SVG and just gave it to coworker was like, can you animate this emoji? And now it has like this beautiful loopy animation. Um, and I mean, I think obviously this goes down to like, it turns out you can do more things with code than you expected, but it, it’s like that kind of stuff that is really fun to me. So, long story short, I would love to see like, the kind of things you’re doing. swyx: I’ll pull it up. I’ll pull it up. Felix: Yeah. Yeah. swyx: Uh, but before we get into it, I, I think always wanna start with like a top level. What is Claude Cowork for people who haven’t heard of it? Haven’t tried it out. Felix: Okay. Uh, real quick, Claude Cowork is a user friendly version of Claude Code. So the way it basically works is we have Claude Code and for us, fairly impressive agent harness that over December we noticed more and more people are using either, eve