The Startup Ideas Podcast - Claude Code's Creator Reveals "Claude Cowork"'s Setup

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

In this episode, I sit down with Boris, the creator of Claude Code and one of the key builders behind Claude Cowork, to unpack what Cowork actually unlocks and how people use it in the real world. He walks through a hands-on demo where Cowork organizes files, extracts receipt data, builds a clean spreadsheet, and even drives the browser to create and share a Google Sheet. We go deep on how “agentic” work feels different when the model takes actions across your computer, your browser, and your tools. Then I shift into Boris’s viral workflow for Claude Code: parallel sessions, plan-first execution, Claude.md as a compounding team memory, and verification loops that dramatically improve output quality. Timestamps: 00:00 – Intro 03:26 – Cowork Overview 05:51 – Demo: Folder Access + Renaming Receipts 08:23 – Demo: Turning Receipts Into A Spreadsheet 10:52 – Demo: Google Sheets + Chrome Control 15:52 – Demo: Emailing The Sheet + Parallel Tasking 22:07 – Best way to start/use with Cowork 24:22 – Where will AI and Agents Go Next 28:44 – Boris’s Claude Code Setup 41:12 – The “Claude” Pronunciation Discussion Key Points I use Cowork as a “doer,” not a chat: it touches files, browsers, and tools directly. I think about productivity as parallelism: multiple tasks running while I steer outcomes. I treat Claude.md as compounding memory: every mistake becomes a durable rule for the team. I run plan-first workflows: once the plan is solid, execution gets dramatically cleaner. I give Claude a way to verify output (browser/tests): verification drives quality. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND BORIS ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/bcherny

Claude Co-Work is here. And if you understand how to use it, you're going to be able to outperform 99% of people on this planet. It is an easy way for you to use Claude Code. You might have heard of Claude code. It's gone viral. But the problem is it feels technical. You have to go into the terminal.

And it's not fun for a lot of beginners. So Claude has come up with Co-Work. And it's a brand new product that harnesses the power of Claude Code and a UI that is simple that anyone could use. that your dad can use, your mom could use, hey, even you can use. So in this episode, I brought on Boris, the maker of this product. I'm so excited that he shows you the best practices for how to use Claude Co-Work and at the end, how he sets up his Claude Code to get the most out of it.

You're going to love this episode. We are lucky. We've got Boris. He's the creator of Claude Code. And I would say the co-creator of Claude Co-Cowwork today. And today, what I want to get accomplished is everyone's talking about co-work and I want to best understand what are the use cases, how can we get started? What are some non-obvious ways I can use it? So Boris, thank you so much for coming on the show. And I have one question for you.

By the end of this episode, what are people going to get out of it? Ooh, I think people are going to start to get some more ideas for how to use co-work. and hopefully they're going to tweet about it and maybe they'll even reach out to me so I could learn how they want to use code. It's funny, I feel like Quad code from the beginning, it was sort of built to be,

it wasn't actually built to be a product at all, but when we first started thinking about it as a product, we thought that the thing people would use it for is coding, but we learned very quickly that people didn't just use it for coding. They used it for like all sorts of stuff. So I kind of feel the journey of quad code has been very surprising. And I have been learning so much just watching how people use the product and how they abuse it and kind of like what they actually want to use it for. And even if it's not designed for that.

So I kind of feel the same way about coworker. You know, I have some ideas about what people are going to use it for. I kind of view these as hypotheses. And so, you know, happy to talk about it. Happy to be able to do a quick demo to show you kind of some of the things that we use it for. But I think that it's going to be pretty surprising. And I hope that I will be surprised when we see how people actually use it in the wild. Yeah, I think that's always the case with platforms, especially if you think about it.

Like when the makers of the app store created the app store, you know, the initial apps was like, you know, a beer drinking app and like a bunch of random apps like that. Did they know that Uber was going to come out of that, DoorDash was going to come out of that, TikTok was going to come out of that? Probably not. So I think that what's really cool about the phase that we are in right now with Claude Code and also Claude Co-work is we're all figuring it out at the same time. And none of us, including the creator, have all the answers. But I agree with you. It's a good time to be sharing some, you know, sharing what's working, what's not working. And, you know, if you're open to it, let's screen share and get our hands dirty.

Yeah, yeah, let's do it. So what are we looking at right now, Boris? Yeah, so this is the, this is the cloud desktop app. So you just download it. Co-work is only available for macOS, you know, Windows coming soon. There's a few different tabs in the desktop app. So there's the chat, that's the default. There's co-work.

That's the new one. And there's code. And that's just quad-code. Co-work under the hood, it's actually just quad-code. And so, you know, the agent that makes quad-code awesome. We call it the quad agent. It's also available as the quad agent SDK. So you can use it programmatically.

You can, you know, all sorts of companies build all sorts of cool things on top of it. We actually use that same exact SDK directly in cowork. So it's like, you know, it's pretty cool. It's just kind of one way or across everything. We have the best agent, have the best agentic model. Might as well use it. And so what I'll do is just to kind of show how to use this thing. And, you know, like, when I think about agentic AI, this word agentic has sort of lost

all meaning because it's just like used so much. So I feel like probably a lot of listeners have heard the word agent, but they don't actually know what it means or, you know, they think it's like some like cool AI or something. But it actually has like a very specific meaning in the AI world, which I think has kind of been lost because a lot of the products that people have released in cold agentic in the past are not actually agentic. And so like when you think about the AI products that everyone's used, you know,

like obviously quad code, chat-paced apps where, you know, you just chat with the app kind of back and forth. send some messages. The biggest difference with agents is it can take action. And, you know, it's not just text and it's not just like web searching, but it can actually use tools on your computer. It can interact with the world. And so for Anthropic from the very beginning, since before our models were good, like

before like, you know, like Quad 3 or whatever, this is a thing that we wanted to get really good at because we felt that it's very important. And so from the start, we wanted our models to be really great at coding and then really great at tool use and then really great at computer use. So it's kind of cool like, you know, the last year, seeing how people have been hacking quad code, it's pretty obvious. This is kind of the place that we should go. And so for people that have used quad code, you know, none of this will be, you know, like too surprising. These are actually things that you can do. So really what we're trying to do is make this something that everyone can use in a way that's safe.

And so what I'm going to do is, you know, here my data. desktop, I have this like receipts folder. I have a few receipts in it. So I'm just going to give cowork access to my desktop. And you have to pick like which specific folders I can see. By default, they can't see anything. So you have to kind of opt in to see, to let it access specific folders. And so I'm going to say, you know, I can say, I have a receipts folder.

Can you rename the files to match? the dates on the receipts. So I think one interesting thing is when you're using co-work, it's really like it's operating with your files. Like that's a big sort of mindset shift that people should have. It's almost like your operating system. Is that right? Yeah, exactly.

It's like it has your files, so the ones that you give it access to. But actually the even core thing is it can use all sorts of tools. And so like files actually is like, you know, that's like, that's useful. but it's not like that cool. What's actually much more interesting is it can generate files for you. So, you know, it can make like presentations and things like this. It can interact with any tool over MCP. And it has built-in support for Chrome-based browsers.

So it can actually control your browser to do stuff. And so I'll kind of show that a little bit. So this is kind of the first step. When you're first getting started with cowork, the thing I recommend is, you know, do exactly what I just did. You know, just mount the folder, give cowork access to it. And just like play around with it. It's super useful for cleaning up files, organizing, things like that. And so here, it found these four receipts that I have.

It's asking me if one of the receipts, I guess, is missing a date. So should I just rename the others? So I'll just say, you know, for one, it's, I'll say it's like up to you. And then for two, I'll say don't rename it. And we actually call this like reverse. solicitation in the AI world. So what this means is when the model is unsure about something, it's going to ask you for clarification.

And we've sort of taught the model to be pretty good at this. So instead of assuming if it's unsure about something, it's just going to ask you. And so yeah, in this case, so it renamed the receipts. So I'm just going to open this up to double check. Yeah, cool. And so the receipts were named a little bit better organized. And so maybe what I can try next is, you know,

Let's like put this in a spreadsheet. So it takes control of your computer, basically, in that sense, right? If you allow it to take control. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so we put like so much work into kind of safety and making sure that as this happens, you don't like accidentally shoot yourself in the foot and like delete files or whatever. So there's just like a huge amount of work that went into this. And it kind of starts at the model side where, you know, for Anthropic from the very beginning,

we were the AI safety lab, and that's the reason that we exist. And so there's a lot of work into alignment and mechanistic interpretability and kind of all these ideas to make sure that the model does what you want in a way that's safe, kind of at the model layer.

And this literally means like studying the neurons, kind of the same way that you would study neurons in the human. And so, you know, you can identify structures and you can kind of study in a very scientific way as a black box also to make sure that it's safe. So this is called the alignment. And then we do a whole bunch of other stuff.

So there's actually a whole virtual machine running under the hood. And this is just to make sure that any action taken are safe and don't affect your broader system. And then as of last week, there's also deletion protection. So if you accidentally delete something, then you're going to get prompted first. So the model can kind of make sure that that's actually a thing that you want to do. Obviously, also as we start interacting with the internet, something like prompt injection is quite scary. And so we built in a lot of protections against that. Obviously, you know, it's not perfect and it's something we're iterating on.

But there's also part of the reason that we released this pretty early is we want to see how people use it. And a big part of making model safe isn't just studying them in a lab, but setting them in the wild to see how it's useful. And so this was like pretty cool, right? So we have this folder. First, it kind of renamed all my receipts. I asked it to make a sheet. It just made this spreadsheet. So it's already here.

Maybe I don't want a spreadsheet. Maybe I want like a Google sheet. So actually. That's so interesting, right? Because like I think where people stumble with tools like co-work and cloud code is because you can do anything, making it of course that makes sense, making it a Google sheet. But like that's where it's so interesting that you can, you really can treat it like a teammate in that sense. Right. Like go and do this thing.

The world is your oyster. Whoa. What is happening? now. Yeah, so it's like it's opening the browser. And so here it's going to ask me for permission. Just for this demo, I'm going to say always allow for the site. But you can just say like allow ones or deny.

And so quad's taken the wheel. It's making a spreadsheet for me. This is going to sort of take a while. And so this is one of the things that we're iterating on is like making this kind of computer use a lot faster. I remember like, man, this is like when I first joined Anthropic. And this was maybe, this like, Sonnet 3.6 days or I forget what we called it, like Sonnet 3.5 new.

And that was the first model that I think we really started to crack computers. And I remember I was like sitting with my team. And there was literally a researcher that ran into the room like in the movies and was like, oh my God, Quad knows how to use computers. And we just had it like order a pizza. And it picked a pineapple pizza and then ordered it. And it asked us for a credit card. And then we got that delivered to the office.

But it was tedious. It took like an hour or something for it to click around. And since then, we've been improving the model's ability to use a computer. And so you can kind of see that here. So here, the quad is typing and it's interacting with the spreadsheet. And it can see what's on the screen. It can interact with it. Anything that's in your browser, it can just use.

And could it use, like, email, you know, let's say we wanted to send this to somebody, you know, finance team. Like, can you, maybe we'll get into it later, but, you know, with things like, and MCPs. Is that possible? Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay, so let's make this kind of a nice spreadsheet because we don't want to send like a badly formatted spreadsheet

to our coworker. But let's make it nice. And then we can ask Cloud to send it. And so here it's kind of cool. It's like, you know, it's still early days. And so there's some like formatting mistakes. It didn't paste it exactly correctly. But it noticed it.

So notice that, you know, it's not actually split correctly. And so now it's trying to format it. So can I notice this? And yeah, Greg, like, to your point, it's funny, these like these use cases and the way that people are going to use these tools, like I said at the start, it's going to be so surprising. I'm just so excited to see how people use it. And sort of the crazy thing about them is they're so general purpose. It's like, it's sort of like a computer itself or like the internet or something. Like you said, like when you first like had an iPhone, like you would never have predicted that, you know, there would be an Uber app at some point.

but, you know, that's what happened. And I sort of feel like we're at the beginning of that, but for agents. Yeah, I think it sounds so obvious in hindsight. Like, of course, you have a phone with GPS. Of course, right? You're going to have things like Uber and DoorDash and stuff like that. But I feel like, yes, you're right. I think, like, what I'm trying to figure out in my mind, like, I'm watching this and I'm like, this is really cool,

but I'm thinking about like, okay, you know, how do I audit like my entire company? Like, what are all the tasks that the company is doing? How are they interacting with files and how are they using the internet and how are they sending things? And then what are opportunities I can use to like make my team and also my life more productive? That's what's going through my head right now. Yeah, yeah, totally. That's a great way to think about it. And by the way, something that's kind of cool is, you know,

as this is running, I'm just going to make a new task and do something else. So, you know, what are some cool episodes? Startup. While this one's running, we can let this one go to. And I often have a bunch of tasks running in parallel, too. But yeah, that's exactly it. It's like, you should just think about, like, what's the tedious stuff that you do every day? And you can just throw all this stuff to co-work.

And I feel like this happened for coding over the last year, because, of course, engineers and, you know, programmers are the earliest adopters. So when the tooling first became able to do that kind of work, engineers adopted it first. But, you know, now this is coming. Now this is possible for everyone else to use too. So that's like, that's super exciting. And when we talk to engineers about the way they like to use quad code, you know, they run

a bunch of quads in parallel. They use it to automate the tedious stuff. And I don't know, man. Like, for me, this is just the most fun I've ever had as an engineer because I get to do the stuff that I enjoy and I just feel so productive because Klaude does all the, you know, the stuff that I didn't want to do. Okay. So now we have this like, we have the spreadsheet.

This looks all right. It's not too bad. The data looks correct. You know, one thing that's missing though is, well, we can add maybe like the totals, but I think for the sake of the demo, what I'm going to do is I'm going to see if it can email it. So just reading for audio to listeners, can you open Gmail and send the sheet to Amy? Yeah, so I'm going to say always continue. So how is it going to know it's Amy, right?

It's going to pull up the contacts within Gmail? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly it. It's going to interact with it the same way that anyone else would interact with a computer. And it's the same thing. It can click stuff. It can read the screen. Okay.

So compose window open. Let me type Amy. So you have like multiple, when you're like locked in, so to speak, you're kind of, you have multiple of these windows open at or multiple multiple virtual machines open at the same time. Yeah, yeah. I usually have a bunch of these, you know, like five or five or ten or whatever. And so we can see the models, you know, trying to interact with this. And so it filled out Amy. And you know, by the way, just because this is, you know, going on YouTube, you know you're going to have some haters in the comments.

So we're just going to address them right now. Someone in the comments is going to be like, but that's so slow, I can do it faster myself or something. What is your reaction? Of course you can. Yeah. I could definitely do this much faster. And it's actually the same thing for a lot of quad code, right? Like, especially at the beginning, I could do it much faster.

But I think sort of two things happen. one is that the model just gets better at doing it quickly. And this is just something I would expect over time. But then the second thing is because you can do multiple things in parallel, it's actually a big time saver. And so usually my workflow is I'll kick off, you know, like a few different tasks in parallel. And I'll just kind of like go back and forth between them and kind of tend to my quads, make sure they're in a good place, see if they have any questions or anything like that.

So it's really a different kind of workflow. Like I feel like now is the age of like kind of multi, multi-clotting of of perilism of like not going super deep on stuff but kind of being more of a generalist and more tending tending to your clods and so like this was this other chat that we kicked off earlier and in this case it sort of did some research so that's pretty cool so it didn't just go to you know like startup ideas podcast website but it searched the internet checked a bunch of different places checked like someone's notes about it yeah 10 10 rules for for cloud code. Yeah, I'll find that interesting too.

And let's see. So it seems like this is, the email is probably all drafted. The draft has been saved. Yeah. Please send. And I also use this for like Slack too. Like a pretty common use case I've been doing maybe a couple times a week is I have a spreadsheet where we track all the teams work for for the month or for the week or whatever. And instead of having to bug everyone on the team to fill out the status, What I do is I ask co-work to look at the spreadsheet, any column that's not filled out, just message the engineer on Slack. And it does that really well. So, you know, I just ask it to do that.

And then I go get a coffee and I don't have to do that anymore. Do you think that co-work is going to be the gateway drug to Claude Code? Because for a lot of beginners, non-technical people, cloud code feels a bit overwhelming. But when I'm watching you do this, this feels, you know, approachable. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like probably two kinds of users. And it's also, it's funny, Claude Code is built originally in a terminal. And, you know, nowadays it's available in the Cloud mobile app. It's available on the website, in the IDE, on Slack, on GitHub.

So, you know, nowadays it's available everywhere, but originally it was built in the terminal. And I never thought that most engineers would want to use a terminal because, you know, it's scary. It's like this thing that's sort of hidden away on the computer, like, you know, only the most hardcore engineer is want to actually work in a terminal day in and day out. And so it's surprising to me that most engineers wanted to use it. What's even more surprising is a lot of non-engineers started to use it. And that was the craziest thing. And looking at like the sales team at Anthropic, like the GTM team,

half of them use quad code every week. And looking at other non-technical people at Anthropic like designers, product managers, data scientists, pretty much all of them use quad code every day. So that's been like pretty surprising. But my hypothesis is what they would prefer. is actually something a little bit more like this, where you don't have to deal with a terminal and all that kind of thing. You have a nice UI because you don't need access to bash and all that kind of stuff,

because the model will just do it for you. Yeah, I think what I would love with something like this is, you know, automating some of these processes. It's like instead of doing one-offs, it's like anytime this happens, I want you to do this. That's my dream. Yeah, it's a cool idea. I'm excited to see how it's tied into skills also. I think it's something we're thinking about.

We haven't quite figured out yet. Yeah, because like a skill, what is it? It's essentially kind of a repeatable way to do something. And so you saw that a little bit earlier up in this conversation where when Quad was generating this spreadsheet. I don't know if you saw it, but it actually loaded the skill. And so we prepackaged the skill for Excel. And that's the way that Quad knows how to do it. And so if you have some weird file format, I don't know, if you work with a skill,

like AutoCat or if you work with, you know, like Salesforce, whatever it is the tool, the tool that you use, just make a skill and then Quad can do it for you. That's interesting. So if you have more skills, co-work and you're asking it, you know, to do things related to those skills, co-work is more likely to use those skills. So you might be able to get a better outcome out of co-work if you, you know, do some upfront work. to actually create some skills? I think so. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's good to know. And, you know, what else do we need to know about co-work? Because I know there's, you know, there's extensions, there's their skills.

Like, walk us through some of, is there anything else that, you know, we need to know in order to get the most out of the product? You know, we tried to build core work just to be pretty simple. When we think about the different audiences, we serve for an audience like engineers, they don't actually like Simple. Simple is good by default, but engineers love to hack their tools.

They love to customize their tools. So that's actually really important. So Quad Code is just like the most customizable coding agent. It has just like so many extension points. There's like there's skills, there's custom agents, there's hooks.

There's an insane amount of configuration and settings that you can set, you know, there's a very sophisticated permission system. So there's all sorts of ways to customize it. And this is because we know every engineer works different, and everyone has different preferences. Everyone uses a different text stack. Everyone uses a different editor.

Everyone uses a different OS. So we wanted to make sure it's really customizable. For some of my cowork, I think we're kind of starting in the opposite direction. And just keep it really simple at the start. And so if you use core work, I would probably not customize too much. Like, if you have cowork installed and you install the Chrome extension, that's pretty much all you need. And it'll do everything else for you. I think over time, as you find yourself using maybe software that cowork is not great at,

like that's the point to think about writing skills. But that wouldn't be my starting point. Just start simple. Like, you know, see how it works. See what's useful. And I think also the other thing, you know, it's just, it's so early. This feels to me a lot like quad code a year ago where, you know, we released it before. it was early. It was not very good yet. It was like super buggy. It kind of barely worked. The model

was not very good at coding a year ago. And it kind of feels like that to me. But I think core work is actually a little bit better than quad code was when we first released it because it's actually useful. And, you know, it's already a thing that I use every day. And yeah, I think in the first week, we've seen so much more growth. It's been like a multiple of the growth that we saw with QuadCode the first week. So that's very exciting. It seems like this is something that people are already finding useful. You know, we're recording this, what is it, January 2026. If we come back here in 12 months, it's January 2027, how do you think people are going to

be using cowork? You know, I know you don't have a crystal ball exactly, but what sort of use cases? And what does the product look like? Like describe the world in January 2027 with co-work. Oh, geez, Greg. I plan in like a one week timeline. The model is just changing so fast. It's so hard.

And I just feel like, you know, like the model is, it's advancing exponential and just like my puny human meat brain like can't grapple with the exponential. It's like we think in lineers. And so I think this kind of exponential is just very, very difficult to plan around. Okay. But if I had to speculate it, a year ago, I made and I think Dario also made this prediction. that by the end of the year, people wouldn't be writing code anymore. And I think that was like sometime mid, you know, last year or something. In, you know, I code every day.

I ship, you know, two, 300 PRs every month or something like that. And in the last two months, quad code has written 100% of my code. I haven't written a single line by hand. And this is something like I also predicted this, you know, like way back middle of last year. it was sort of not intuitive because if you just think about kind of the experience at the time you trace it linearly,

there's just no way that the model would be at that point. So you really have to kind of believe in the exponential and just literally like plot it out and kind of follow the way that the line goes. That's the only way that you would have predicted this. And it was just, it was absolutely right. And so I think for coding, this is something that we're going to start to see in more and more places

for more and more kinds of code, that the model is able to just do all of it. it. And when we think about co-work, I think it's somewhat similar. I think it's a little bit earlier. And I think what we're going to see is for all this kind of tedious tasks, like, you know, like connecting app A&B or kind of shuffling data back and forth or whatever, the model is just going to be able to do it. And it's going to get increasingly good at it. This is, I think in some ways, it's a little scary. And in some ways, I think it's really exciting because you don't have to spend your time on this toilsome work anymore. you can just focus on the work that you enjoy. And also everyone, I think, just becomes much, much more productive because you have an army of clods that can do this.

Okay, I like that feature. I like that feature a lot. It's a hard question. It's a hard question. When you, it's sort of like the genies out of the bottle, and it's hard to predict like where the genie is going to go. So I believe that co-work is the gateway drug to Claude Code. I think that people are going to start using it,

and they're going to develop, like, vertical use cases, like for whatever it is their businesses. Like, you mentioned AutoCAD. Like, you probably weren't thinking about AutoCAD when you were helping develop Co-work. So I think there's going to be, like, these verticals. And I think that co-work is going to be similar to, like, vertical job boards,

there's very specific roles that you can hire to people. And I do think that there's going to be this combination between skills and these digital teammates that you're going to quote unquote hire. Yeah, that's super interesting. Maybe we should make a bet and just see where it pans out in the year. But I have no idea. But it's definitely interesting to speculate because I just feel like the way this technology goes is so different than past technology waves.

It's sort of similar to the internet. it's sort of similar to computers, you know, like maybe like telephones or something before that, but the speed is just so much faster. And because it's kind of piggybacking on all of this, like the internet could not exist without telephones, telephones and kind of like phone lines being everywhere. You couldn't have dial-up without it.

You know, mobile phones couldn't exist without the internet existing. So it's sort of like every layer of the stack, it just gets more and more powerful and it spreads more quickly. And so it's like on the back of all of this that AI can exist. And yeah, it's just, It's going to be very exciting to see where it goes. I want to shift gears just for the last 10 minutes because we mentioned Claude Code. You had a post that went absolutely viral.

I think you know what post I'm going to talk about, 99,000 bookmarks, which is crazy. And I'm going to share my screen. I want to go over it a little bit. This is me learning to use Twitter. I think I made an account like a decade ago and I haven't really used it. It's funny. Yeah, it's been fun to run. You have just a few tweets, but like this one, you figured it out.

You say, I'm Boris. I created cloud code. Lots of people have asked for how I use cloud codes. I want to show off my setup a bit. My setup might be surprisingly vanilla. Cloud code works great out of the box, so I personally don't customize it much. There's no one correct way to use cloud code. We intentionally built it in a way that you can use it, customize it, and hack it.

you'd like, each person on the Cloud Code team use it very differently. So here it goes. Could you just talk about some of the, just expand on some of these and what you were saying, you know, what you were saying on here because I thought it was really interesting. Yeah, I'd love to. So this first one, it's very similar to what I was showing in cowork, where my job now isn't to go super deep on one task. It's to do a bunch of tasks in parallel. And so, you know, in the, when I'm working on Quad Code, I usually work in a terminal. or on the mobile app. These are kind of the two services I use the most.

But like I said, everyone on the team is different. Every user prefers something different. So we build all of these. And so usually what I do is I'll start a task in kind of one tab. And once Quad is thinking about it and starting to work on a plan, I'll move on to the second tab. And I'll ask it to make a plan for the second thing. Then I'll move on to the third one. Ask it to make a plan.

And then finally, like when I've run out of immediate task to do, I'll go back to the first tab. I'll see if the plan looks good. I might go back and forth a little bit. And then once the plan looks good, I usually go into just auto-accept edits right away. Because I think with Opus 4.5, once the plan is good, the model can just execute it pretty much perfectly. This is definitely not the case with previous models. And so I think there was a lot of excitement about Opus 4.5 over the last couple months. And I think this is kind of one of the big reasons.

It's just gotten very good at coding, but also excellent at planning. So once the plan is good, the code is good. And so, yeah, my work now is just jumping between tabs, kind of tending to the clods, make sure they're unblocked, answering their questions. With cowork, I think it's actually quite similar now. I like that. I'm going to quote you on that. Once the plan is good, the code is good because that's so true, right?

Because if you nail the plan, the code should, you know, the agents should do the work. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think, like, sometime last year there was all this buzz about spectrum and development. Yeah. And, you know, it just feels like it's a. feels a little like too QT and a little too rigid to me. But I think this is sort of a form of spec-driven development. It's like there is some kind of spec.

You know, I think it's just like a plan. That's all it has to be. It's just a text file. It doesn't have to be in a particular format. Once you have that, you're good. Number two, you say I also run five to ten clods in parallel with my local clods. As I code in my terminal, I will often hand off local sessions to web using and or manually kick off sessions in Chrome.

And sometimes I will teleport back. and forth. I also start a few sessions from my phone, obviously, from Cloud iOS app you got to every morning and throughout the day and check in on them later. What do you mean by that? This morning, I kicked off, I think, like, three claws as soon as I woke up. I just had some thought in the morning about, well, maybe I should build this thing or fix this bug or whatever. I was like checking Twitter and someone had a bug report. So I just opened my phone and, you know, in the quad app, on the website, you click the little menu and there's a code tab. So you can just access quad code there.

That's what I use for a lot of my code. And it's funny, I never would have guessed that this is the way that I code. If you asked me a year ago, I would never have predicted that the way I code now is like, probably half of it is just on my phone and it sort of just works. And then web is kind of the other part. So once I've run out of tabs, because it's just like, you know, it's kind of pain to manage a bunch of different get checkouts. because in each tab in my terminal,

I actually have a totally separate Git checkout. And I don't really use work trees or anything like that. I just keep it pretty simple. And in web, if I just ran out of terminal tabs, I'll just start like overflowing to web and starting tasks there. Beautiful. So yeah, I also, so recommending use iOS, use web, open multiple, like that's what that's, you'll get the most out of it that way.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And we have an Android app now too. So, yeah, just like use the mobile app and see how far that can take you. If it's not giving you good results, also make sure that you tune the environment set up and make sure that you invest in your quad.md. That's super duper important. And I talk about that in number four also.

Number three, you say I use Opus 4.5 with thinking for everything. It's the best coding model I've ever used. And even though it's bigger and slower than Sonnet, since you have to steer it less, and it's better at tool use, it's almost always fast. faster than using a smaller model in the end. And cheaper. It's sort of counterintuitive. And I had to explain this to people a few times.

But because the model is smarter, it actually uses less tokens in the end. And it uses so many less tokens. It's often cheaper than using a smaller, less intelligent model, even though the per token cost for that model is lower. So little counterintuitive. But yeah, just use the smartest thing if you can. Well, we appreciate that. You know, we appreciate that. Number four, our team shares a single Claude MD for the Claude Code repo.

We check it in to get. The whole team contributes multiple times a week. Anytime we see Cloud do something incorrectly, we add it to the MD so Claude knows not to do it next time. Other teams maintain their own Cloud MDs. It is each team's job to keep theirs up to date. And the QuadMD is just a text file. So there's no special format. People ask this all the time.

some special format that it has to be in it. No, it's just like, it's just a text file. So you can put whatever you want in it. This is a screenshot of our QuadMD. This is literally it. So just really simple. And you know, you could format this kind of however you want. Love it. And then finally, I think, yeah, number five. Oh, no, you have a, you got a few more. So, number five, during code review, I'll often tag at dot Cloud on my co-workers PR to add something to the Cloud MD as part of the PR. We use the Cloud code GitHub action for

this. It's our version of Dan Chipper's compounding engineering. What do you mean? What is compound engineering? Yeah. Oh my God. So there's actually like two bugs in this tweet. I think Dan actually calls a compound engineering, not compounding engineering. And then the at dot quad, this is me

wording how to use X. But it's actually at Quad. There's no dot. I just didn't, I think there's like an actual user or something whose name is Quad. I didn't want to attack them. But yeah, so what you do is in cloud code, you run this slash command slash install GitHub action. And what this does is it installs the cloud app in your GitHub repo. And what that lets you do is you can then add mention cloud whenever you want and just have it make changes.

And it can just work on PR. So it'll push back to your branch and it'll push the changes right back. You can also tag it on issues. You can tag it kind of wherever. I do this multiple times a day. It's really, really useful. I think one of the most common use cases is just like little fixes. I think the other one is updating the quadmd to keep the knowledge based up to date.

And you should never have to comment about something twice. Back when I was at meta, something that I did is, this is like in a previous life, in a previous job, something that I did is every code review that I did, I would keep a spreadsheet of all the issues that came up. And whenever the same kind of issue came up again, I would just like tallyed up in the spreadsheet. And whenever something hit, I think like five or 10 tallys or something, I would write a Lint rule. And what that is is it's a way to automate that part of the coder view. So I don't have to comment about it again. And that was back in the days before LEMs and before the model was any good at coding.

And so this is the equivalent nowadays. You just tag Claude and you have an update your CloudMD, which is your team's knowledge base. So really simple. And what this means is you don't have to point anything out twice. I'm curious to see what this looks like for cowork. I don't think we figured that out yet. But definitely for Quad code, Quad MD is kind of the, this is the one thing that you should all be updating all the time.

Love it. Number six, most sessions start in plan mode. If my goal is to write a poll request, I will use plan mode, go back and forth with Claude until I like its plan. From there, I switch into auto-accept, edit's mode, and Cloud can usually one-shot it. A good plan is really important. Yeah, like I said, planning is just the more.

most underused feature in quad code. Actually, a lot of people use it, but I would say still underused. I use it for almost all my sessions. Yeah, it's a no-brainer. So if you aren't already doing this, please do. Do we've got, you know, we're not going to have time to do all of them. What are the, I don't think, because you have a hard stop. Do you want to pick one or two to end with?

Yeah, let's do Let's do maybe number 13 Yeah, number 13, I think this is probably In addition to using Opus 4. When people ask about how to get better performance at a quad code, there's three things that I recommend almost every time. Number one is use Opus 4.5 with thinking always.

Don't try to use a different model because Opus will just give you better results and more efficiency overall. The second thing is make sure you have a good QuadMD and then the third thing is this tip number 13 we just give quad a way to verify its output. And so we just kind of saw with co-work how good clot is at using the Chrome extension in order to write email and in order to work with sheets.

And it's exactly the same thing. If I'm building an app, I always use the Chrome extension to have Quad test its own work. And if Quad can verify its own output, the result is going to be way, way better. And it's sort of like, you know, imagine that you're a painter and you're, you're, You make paintings and they have to be like pretty good. They have to be maybe even like photo realistic or something or just like, you know, some kind of like very detailed style. And you have to wear a blindfold.

You're just not going to be that good. It's not going to come out that great. Or is the same thing for an engineer. Like if you have to write code, but you can never run the code or you can never see the output and you can never see the website. It's just not going to be good. And so it's the same thing with quad. As the model gets more intelligent, that first shot is going to get better and better.

But really you want to get. give it a way to verify the output, and it'll be much better. So this is like running tests, if you're an engineer, starting a server, also if you're an engineer, or, you know, seeing the output in a simulator or in a browser. Amazing. And the ultimate tip, I guess, is just get your hands dirty, right? That's it. Yeah.

I mean, there's no one right way to use the stuff. Like, you know, see, see what's useful. See what's not. Find your own workflows. It's sort of, I heard someone describing quad code as. like a find your own path book. You know, like one of those books where you have to like, do you do, do you go to the dungeon or do you explore the forest like this kind of thing or like an old like RPG video game?

It's just kind of like that. It's like it's very free form. There's no one right way to do it. So just see what works for you. Boris, I appreciate you taking the time, the generosity to spill the sauce and just to share with us how we can get the most out of both co-work and Claude Code. everyone's thinking about it and everyone's trying to, especially on this podcast. You know, the startup ideas podcast, you have millions of people who are trying to figure out

how I can be more productive and how I can build businesses around some of these things. So thank you for the time. I'll include links on where to follow Boris. He doesn't tweet a lot, but when he tweets, it's worth paying attention to. And I just have, I want to leave with one thing just because my audience would kill me if I didn't ask this. So as you know, Boris, I'm from French Canada. and we speak French, obviously, in French Canada. And I call Claude.

Am I the only one? Oh, man. You're probably not the only one. A lot of the world speaks French. Which one sounds better? What feels right to you? I mean, to me, Claude sounds better. It's like Jean-Claude Van Damme,

even though people would say John Claude Van Damme. It's like, that's my take. That's my hot take. To me, it sounds better. You know, Greg, I'm going to, today around the office, I'm just going to call it Claude, and we'll see what people will say. I'll report back. Okay, report back.

All right. Sounds good. Boris, thanks again for coming on, and I'll see you next time. Yeah, thanks so much, Craig.