I spent a large part of 2025 obsessed with the idea of “Cursor for everyone.” Today I read about Anthropic’s Claude Code Cowork, and it seems like the perfect execution of that vision!
My thesis
AI-powered natural language coding tools unlocked a world of possibilities for non-technical business users to transform their workflows without being blocked on technical bandwidth.
And this wasn’t “vibe coding” alone in the sense of one-shotting some website. But more mundane stuff, that someone without a programming background wouldn’t intuitively think of doing any other way than manually.
Like one time, when faced with 3 PDF files with similar-ish data that I wanted to compare, I converted those 3 large PDF files into images, set up a Python pipeline to parse text from those images using Nano Banana, dumped it all in a structured CSV, and managed to visualise everything in a nice UI…all in a few minutes.
The Build with AI workshops for non-technical business users and then a lot of the AI Consulting work I did towards the end of the year were all humble attempts at spreading this feeling of “sipping rocket fuel” - hoping people unlock the intuition of “let me try this with Cursor” first.
What I underestimated
How hard it is to unlock that intuition for people unless they spent a significant amount of time experimenting: and most people don’t have the time for that! And once again, a friendly UI makes all the difference!
What is Claude Code Cowork?
It’s just a friendly UI on top of the Claude Code terminal coding agent.
From Simon Willison:
“I’ve seen a few people ask what the difference between this and regular Claude Code is. The answer is not a lot. As far as I can tell Claude Cowork is regular Claude Code wrapped in a less intimidating default interface and with a filesystem sandbox configured for you without you needing to know what a ‘filesystem sandbox’ is.”
Unfortunately, Anthropic’s products continue to be extremely expensive for India. I haven’t tried Cowork yet as it’s currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month plans).
Looking forward to 2026 when this becomes more commonly available across all providers…we’re in for some fun times!