Claude CoWork: bringing your experience to the fore | Post 3 of 6

Why do senior staff produce higher quality work than juniors? All else being equal, a senior person has years of experience: they know what works and what doesn't. That begs the question: what is experience? Imagine you could capture this "experience" and write it down.

In Claude CoWork, you can do just that: they are called "skills". A skill is a reusable set of instructions that makes CoWork a specialist for a specific task. You build it once, and from that point CoWork already knows how you want that work done.

CoWork also helps you build your skills: it has a "skill creator skill" (this is getting very meta now): a skill that guides you through building a new one, then tests and iterates it until it works. It creates a set of examples and runs automated tests against them, using a rubric it designs to assess the skill quality, and iterates on it (with you) until you are happy with the output.

I now have a handful of skills that capture some of my daily work. And for some important work, I have a "review" skill that the "doing" skill must call before it finishes a job. Using this flow it becomes pretty clear why the Agentic aspect is so intriguing: this is real work being performed to an objective quality bar.

Can human experience really be distilled magically into a set of instructions?

Probably not entirely. I think there are nuances: some things we just "know", and can't quite explain why. But for much of it, it's very very good.

• In this series I am working through my own experiences with Claude CoWork: why it feels so different in my daily work and what about it is so unique.
• CoWork is the first of probably many such tools, and as the saying goes: this is the worst they will ever be.