In the last several weeks, Anthropic's Cowork has captured considerable attention. And no wonder—Cowork has an alluring promise: that it can apply all the power of Anthropic's coding agent, Claude Code, to nonprogramming tasks in a simple tool.

The reality is, like many freshly hired human co-workers, Anthropic's tool has some potential—if you're willing to invest the time.

When I spent a couple days with Cowork, I got it to complete a chore that has sat on my to-do lists for a decade and to automate a task that takes me hours every week—both examples of agentic AI, where the AI can carry out tasks by itself. Cowork isn't bad for someone like me, a person with some facility in coding (who maybe has let their skills get a little rusty). But it was a bumpy experience, and it's hard to imagine the product taking off with a general audience until it works more smoothly and offers a gentler learning curve.