How I AIHow the engineer behind Claude Cowork actually uses Claude | Felix Rieseberg (Anthropic)
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Felix Rieseberg shows practical Claude workflows for work, life, delight
- Claude’s multiple tabs (quick answers, Cowork deep work, Code engineering) reflect a pre-convergence era where the best interface depends on user intent and task type.
- Felix’s key workflow pattern is “go one abstraction layer up,” delegating not just execution (e.g., entering furniture dimensions) but problem-framing and data-gathering (e.g., infer inventory from email receipts).
- He demonstrates Claude Cowork turning a folder of home-buying documents into actionable outputs, including generating a unit-labeled floor plan and producing an interactive 3D furniture planner from a 2D image.
- Live Artifacts extend standard artifacts (files like dashboards and reports) by refreshing with live data via connectors (e.g., Gmail, Calendar, Spotify), enabling evolving personal dashboards rather than static snapshots.
- The episode argues that the main adoption bottleneck isn’t model capability but people’s imagination and workflows, and it closes with tips on latency-friendly asynchronous design and building a simple Bluetooth hardware approval button.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasPick the model based on how well-defined your ask is.
Felix reaches for Sonnet for clearly scoped tasks (e.g., extract dimensions, reformat a floor plan), and uses Opus when he expects the model to reinterpret the problem and help discover what he actually needs—similar to how professionals clarify ambiguous requirements.
Treat Claude as a system builder, not a faster mouse.
He argues AI is “used poorly” when it only performs UI actions; the higher leverage is letting it run annoying background work (data gathering, transforming documents, building small tools) so you preserve time for creative decisions.
Go up an abstraction layer whenever you feel yourself doing tedious setup.
Instead of manually typing furniture dimensions, he first tells Claude what furniture he has, then goes further: “You figure out what furniture I have,” using email receipts as the source of truth—an “anti-to-do list” approach to eliminate recurring drudgery.
Claude Cowork’s power is context + an execution environment.
Cowork can ingest a folder of documents (disclosures, permits, mortgage info) and use its own “computer” (VM) to produce outputs like revised floor plans or interactive tools, turning messy files into usable artifacts.
Live Artifacts are best when they prepare you for decisions, not just summarize.
A daily dashboard is trivial if it only restates your calendar; it becomes valuable when it preps you for meetings by pulling context (who you’re meeting, recent threads, what they worked on) and updating via connectors with a refresh loop.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesAI is used poorly if it just needs to move the mouse cursor for you. I want AI to do a bunch of annoying things in the background to free you up for your creative energy.
— Felix Rieseberg
I reach for Opus over Sonnet if I have self-identified as someone who doesn't really know yet what they're asking for.
— Felix Rieseberg
A truly magical thing is happening with kids because they've never learned what not to ask for. And I think our generation, we're very used to things just not working. So we've been living in this mind prison for way too long.
— Felix Rieseberg
I don't curse at Claude. I don't- I understand that the-- ultimately the chips don't care, right? Like that's, that's the whole thing. Like we ultimately know that I'm in-interacting with a tool here. But for me, as like someone who cares about my mental health, it's like good for me in my own communication with anything to, like, be polite and nice.
— Felix Rieseberg
I have built this little thing, which is just like a teeny-tiny Claude on a little stick, and this stick has Wi-Fi, it has Bluetooth... Claude has built all of that in one shot. I've needed to correct absolutely nothing.
— Felix Rieseberg
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
