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Cowork is the agentic mode in Claude Desktop. Compared to Chat (available on the web, desktop, and mobile), it runs on your computer and completes work across your files, browser, and tools. This tutorial covers when to use it instead of Chat.
Reach for Chat when you have a one-off question or want a thought partner as you work through a problem. Also consider Chat using when the task is light on context, without a spread of files or sources. You're in the conversation the whole time, and the output is text you'll read or take elsewhere. Chat starts instantly, it's available across Claude apps (web, mobile, desktop app) and it remembers you across conversations through Memory.
Reach for Cowork when there's a clear deliverable and the work touches your files or tools — a document to produce, a spreadsheet to build from a folder of inputs, research to pull together across several places, an action to take in your browser. You'd rather hand off the whole job and review what comes back.
| Chat | Cowork | |
|---|---|---|
| Your goal | Still working it out | Clear deliverable in mind |
| The work | A few turns of back-and-forth | Multi-step, multi-source, or long-running |
| Your role | Present for every turn | Describe it once, check back |
| The output | Text you'll read or copy | A finished file or an action taken |
Cowork runs on the same agentic engine as Claude Code — the loop that lets Claude plan, work across tools, and check its own output — applied to your files and apps instead of a codebase. A Cowork task can follow these steps:
Send a prompt describing the objective — what you need done and what done looks like.
Finished files in your folder, actions taken in your tools, and a record of everything that happened.
In Cowork, you can delegate, but stay in control. Claude's actions show up in the sidebar, you can interrupt and redirect at any point, and it asks for your approval before anything consequential — sending an email, posting a message, changing a file outside your working folder.
Open or download the Claude Desktop app. If you haven't tried Cowork, pick a task that spans many steps, files, or sources — describe the outcome, and come back to the result.
