Lights. Camera. Friction.
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This article first appeared on Beware the Default newsletter.
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." -Shunryu Suzuki The plan was simple… Test Anthropic’s new Cowork feature, see what it could do and share what we found. An hour later, we had something more useful than a demo reel. We had an honest record of what happens when you actually try to do complex things with a four-day-old product.
The YouTube VersionYou’ve seen the posts. “I automated my entire life in two hours.” “Two months of work in one afternoon.” The demos are clean and the workflows are pre-scripted. Everything works on the first try. We wanted to know what happens when you don’t have a script. What We Actually TriedOrganize Downloads FolderWorked. A couple minutes. Every .txt file migrated into one folder. 127 files I’d forgotten existed, now living together in a place called “Text Files.” Simple. Isolated. Effective. Multi-Step Content Workflow With Notion MCP.Struggled. The connector fumbled around looking for tools that didn’t exist. Tried to bail out through the browser. We killed it before it wandered too far into the woods.
Browser-Based Email Unsubscribe AutomationSlow. Painfully slow. Authentication hiccups. Permission pop-ups every few seconds like a toddler asking “can I?” over and over. By the time you’ve approved everything, you could have clicked unsubscribe yourself. Twice. Parallel Agent Content MultiplicationSpawned six agents simultaneously. Watched them fan out like caffeinated interns. Looked on as the usage bar went up. 8% of my monthly plan evaporated in one session. Expensive lesson…except for Zain who got 50 pieces of content from my Claude tokens.
iMessage database analyticsThis one caught us off guard. Zane (AKA lil’Z) pointed it at his local messages. It pulled response time ratios, peak texting hours, contacts he leaves waiting longest. Found a middle school group chat with 20,000 messages he’d never replied to. Not once…In over a decade.
The PatternSimple isolated tasks: Solid. Complex multi-step workflows with MCPs and browser: A mess of pop-ups, failed connections, and the distinct feeling that you’re watching someone parallel park a bus. The capability ceiling is lower than the hype suggests. For now. The Product Strategy Hiding in Plain SightCowork has no intention of replacing Claude Code. Cowork wants to get you comfortable enough to eventually open Claude Code. Look at the design choices:
It looks and feels like a gateway drug to Claude Code. Anthropic built an on-ramp. They’re optimizing for the person who would never open a terminal. The one who finds VS Code and Cursor intimidating. The one who wants to do AI things without feeling like they need a computer science degree and a mass stockpile of energy drinks. That person can start here. Get comfortable. Build confidence. And maybe, eventually, click the button next to it.
The limitations serve a purpose. Entry-level product. Fear reduction device. The Part We Didn’t ExpectWe walked into that call as Claude Code users. We had workflows. We had opinions. We knew what “good” looked like. Cowork broke all of that. The Notion MCP fumbled. The browser automation crawled. The token burn blindsided us. Our complex workflows collapsed in ways we couldn’t quickly fix. We couldn’t be experts. And in that forced not-knowing, something shifted. We stopped trying to impose our existing workflows. We started actually seeing what was in front of us. The iMessage demo landed because Zane wasn’t trying to prove anything. He pointed it at his actual data and let it show him something about himself. Response patterns. Forgotten conversations. Who he leaves waiting. A middle school group chat he ghosted for a decade without realizing it. AI as mirror. AI as the thing that tells you what you’ve been avoiding. We stumbled into that because we couldn’t make our default approach work. The Default to BewareThe default is to see tool limitations as failures. We walked in expecting to validate our existing mental models. We expected Cowork to be a simpler version of Claude Code. Same capabilities. Nicer interface. When that expectation shattered, the friction felt like the tool’s problem. The friction was the teacher. It forced us back to basics. Simple tasks. Isolated folders. One thing at a time. It wouldn’t let us be clever. It made us be curious instead. There’s a concept in Zen called shoshin. Beginner’s mind. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.
We achieved shoshin through forced failure. The tool wouldn’t let us be experts. So we had to be beginners. And beginners notice things experts filter out. Where to Actually Use This Thing Right NowIf you’re expecting to replace your Claude Code workflows: don’t. Not yet. If you want to:
It’s solid for that. And if you’ve been intimidated by Claude Code, by terminals, by the whole “agentic AI” thing that sounds like it requires credentials you don’t have. This is your on-ramp. Start simple. Let it fail. See what the friction teaches you. -Max, Tam & the Zains This Is What We Do Every FridayWe hit record on a Friday afternoon expecting to make a demo reel. We made something more useful: an honest record of learning in public. The friction was the point. Inside the Beware the Defaults community, this is what Fridays look like. We test new tools. We share what we’re building. We show the experiments that work and the ones that blow up in our faces. No scripts. No polish. Just practitioners figuring it out together. Join us for $27/month. That price locks in for life before we raise it. Every Friday: Behind the scenes, what we’re building, what we’re experimenting with, what’s actually working and what’s quietly failing. The people who learn fastest aren’t the ones with the best tutorials. They’re the ones willing to look stupid together. Stay Curious, Click below to discover your Cognitive Fingerprint. |
