Cowork & desktop

Guides for the parts of Claude that aren't the API or Claude Code — Cowork, Claude Desktop, and the browser surface. These get far less written about them than the API does, despite being where most non-developers and many developers doing research or planning work actually spend their time, so this cluster focuses on what transfers from the API-focused docs and what genuinely doesn't.

The gap this cluster fills is specific: almost everything published about Claude assumes you're calling the API from code, and a working developer evaluating Cowork or Desktop for a team is left to guess how much of that knowledge actually applies. Some of it does — the underlying models, the context-window mechanics, and the effort/thinking behaviour are the same regardless of surface. Some of it doesn't — data retention, file access, and project-sharing work differently outside the API, and conflating the two leads to wrong assumptions about what a Cowork session can and can't do.

If you're deciding between surfaces for a specific task rather than trying to understand the whole picture, when to use Cowork vs Claude Code is the most direct starting point.