Anthropic merges Claude Cowork and chat into one Claude, adds Docs and Slides in beta

To Anthropic: please don't merge Claude Code and chat. I like keeping their memory separate.

I keep memory off for chat on purpose. Half the time I just want to talk through an approach and it pulls something out of memory that steers the whole decision.

Same on memory. A friend asks you to look something up and Claude drags back a secret you weren't ready to tell anyone yet.

Claude has become an awful value proposition, I'm starting to explore alternatives. Any suggestions?

I turned Anthropic off properly and moved all of it to OpenAI yesterday. Apart from the voice you wouldn't notice a difference, and switching costs are low. Vote with your wallet.

The Codex app is pretty good, lots of banked resets, and far fewer refusals. I like Claude Code for pure coding, but my work keeps touching stuff outside code and I don't want to keep switching.

Codex/Astra has the highest quality model of the major providers right now, especially for cross-discipline work.

I hope this doesn't get as confusing as ChatGPT made it. Claude has some of the best UX and I don't want that diluted.

Claude's UX is jagged if you support non-devs. Chat, Cowork and Claude Code were separate surfaces, plus cloud vs local inside Code, and automating something ordinary either didn't work or got blocked by bot controls. You could tell different teams got mashed into one app.

This is a change for the better. Making people pick a surface was unnecessary complexity, and the ChatGPT desktop app inherited the same problem.

People keep asking for this with Codex too and I regret that both labs seem inclined to listen. A thinking question in Chat mode versus Work mode gives very different answers, and the chat harness is much better for that kind of work.

It not working well today doesn't invalidate the need. Not everyone wants a terminal interface, and I wouldn't want to kick off a scheduled task through a chat box.

People asking for it means there's demand. Maybe you aren't the target audience, and one size can't fit all.

I hope Chat stays all you can eat and Work keeps burning tokens. If Chat starts eating tokens there's not much reason left to use it.

GPT Chat seems smarter for business planning that doesn't need data wrangling, but Work gives the model a computer instance for programmatic access. I've had it cross-reference commute times from traffic-aware map data and build a table of idle time.

In an earlier iteration they at least made the UI distinguish Codex from ChatGPT, which I liked. I spent a weekend in ChatGPT thinking I was in Codex until it behaved unexpectedly.

These launch posts always show someone having a deck built for them on the way to work between devices, and honestly it feels sad and nothing like my life.

Weirdly it matches my life exactly. Presentations were tedious before and doing stuff on the go when motivation strikes is great.

This is a nightmare scenario to me. Claude makes the deck, I walk into the meeting and present barely coherent nonsense with wrong charts, then someone asks about a detail it inferred wrong.

All these demos target a tiny slice of people booking restaurants and generating slide decks. I don't know a single person who has made a restaurant reservation more than once or twice in their life.

It's the romcom job universe where the stakes are always a make-or-break presentation due Friday. Writers have never really had office jobs.