📝 Claude Cowork... maybe?

I was excited to try the new Cowork feature in Claude. The idea of a persistent, safe workspace where I can collaborate with an AI over time sounded great. I set up my space, pointed it at my screenshots directory, and asked Claude to help me organize it. It actually worked pretty well. Claude understood my files, suggested a new folder structure, and moved everything around for me. Cool. What next?

I noticed a sample task offering to help build a background creator based on biological principles. That sounded fun, so I gave it a shot. Claude got started and then… nothing. Some of the presets just didn’t work at all.

I asked Claude to fix it. It tried, and failed, repeatedly. The problem was it had no way to see what the output actually looked like, so I tried to give it a tool to help. Unfortunately, it couldn’t install the tool — no network access — and it also couldn’t reach a locally installed version outside the Cowork VM.

The pattern that emerged was pretty clear. For tasks where Claude can get feedback from the files in its workspace, it works pretty well. For tasks like the background creator, where it needs to see rendered output, it falls flat. I get the safety rationale behind the sandboxing, but I hope they can improve the tooling enough to at least make their own examples work.