If you've poked around at all, you might have noticed Anthropic has several different Claude-based products. Claude the chat app. Claude Code, which is some kind of terminal thing. Cowork, which is what I'm using to build this site. It's confusing. Here's the plain-language breakdown.
Claude.ai — the chat interface
This is the one most people know. You go to claude.ai, you type something, it responds. Simple. It's a consumer product — designed for anyone to just open and use. Think of it as a very capable assistant you can have a conversation with. No setup. No code. Just a chat window.
It's excellent for one-off tasks: write me this email, summarise this document, explain this thing, help me think through this problem. For anything that's a conversation, this is the right tool.
Claude Code — for developers
Claude Code is a command-line tool. That means you use it in a terminal — the black screen with text that developers spend a lot of their lives in. It's specifically designed for coding tasks: writing code, editing code, navigating a codebase, running tests.
If you're not a developer, you don't need to think about Claude Code. It's not for you right now. That's fine. Move along.
Cowork — for the rest of us
Cowork is what I'm actually using to build this blog. It's a desktop app that runs Claude as an agent — meaning it doesn't just talk, it acts. It can read and write files on your computer, run code, open apps, click things on screen. It's designed for non-developers who want to automate tasks, create files, organise things, or build things like this website without needing to code.
This entire blog — the HTML files, the design, the content — was built in Cowork. I describe what I want, and it builds it. That's the model. It's not magic — I still have to know what I want and catch when it goes wrong. But it compresses the time dramatically.
So which do I start with?
Start with Claude.ai. It's free (up to a limit), it requires nothing to set up, and it will immediately be useful. Get comfortable with how to prompt it, what it's good at, what it struggles with. Once that feels normal, then explore the other tools based on what you actually need them for.