The landing page doesn't make it clear to me what value this is providing to me (as a user). I see all of these things that I can theoretically do, but I don't see (1) actual examples of those things (2) how this specific agentic workflow helps.

Looks like a pre-release product. This is to lower the branding and reputational risk.

Ah, the critical problem dilemma. Some percentage of free users become paid users, but the free users take up an unreasonable amount of your time/energy/support.

The solution seems simple. Buy their product.

If you consider product as a proxy for customer, I think it gets a bit easier to understand. Customers don’t care about architecture (unless you have a technical product where they do actually need to know architecture). They don’t care about many of the details. They just want their problem solved.

For software engineers, our goal isn’t to necessarily know what makes good product or not - but we do need to make sure that what we’re building solves an actual customer problem or need.

This is a good article. In fact one of my favorites now (will be sending it to my peers).

There’s a point buried in it that I increasingly come to believe is missed in nearly every single management book and management advice I’ve read. It’s almost there in point 1, but under “don’t have a PM”.

None of these points matter if you’re not creating value for your company. That is the job of a manager - get your team to create value.

I’ve been increasingly disgruntled with most management advice because it overlooks this key point.

I felt like one of the biggest steps back I took in my career was when one of my companies had our management attend training that taught these skills and then the company emphasized these skills repeatedly. Suddenly my career stagnated. I had managed before, I had led before, I had delivered results before. But my growth came grinding to a halt. I was following all of these tips and tricks while overlooking the implicit thing - deliver value.

In many, the same ways, I’ve become wary of any company beliefs, values, or guidelines that aren’t clearly working towards making the company money. They’re really just distractions for the underlying goal.

For me, the angle is a bit different. I want privacy, but I also sense that the people who are really good at this (like Plantir) have so much proxy information available that individual steps to protect privacy are pretty much worthless.

To me, this is a problem that can only be solved at the government/regulatory level.

In principle, I agree with your point; in practice, I think the claims made my these surveillance/advertising companies are likely as overstated as Musk's last decade of self-driving that still can't take a vehicle all the way across the USA without supervision in response to a phone summons.

The evidence I have that causes me to believe them to be overstated, is how even Facebook has frequently shown me ads that inherently make errors about my gender, nationality, the country I live in, and the languages I speak, and those are things they should've been able to figure out with my name, GeoIP, and the occasional message I write.

> I think the claims made my these surveillance/advertising companies are likely as overstated as Musk's last decade of self-driving

They are not overstated, and they are far worse.

It’s funny when Facebook thinks you’re interested in aquariums and shows you aquarium ads when that isn’t your thing at all.

It’ll be a lot less amusing when Palantir thinks you’re interested in bombing government buildings.

Palantir don't sell data though, they just give you a software platform.

They don't sell the data, they sell access to that data

Doubt it. I use a similar setup from time to time.

You need to have different skills at different times. This type of setup helps break those skills out.

> The credit card icon doesn't change the credit card

Ha. I thought I was the only one who's cursed this every single time I need to change payment (which is often)

> You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.

Holding the space bar is your friend on this one. I recently learned, holding two fingers will move with selecting.

Every now and then, normally while I’m bored before departing on a plane, I’ll scroll the App Store. It’s all ads at this point. Lists and lists of “top [x]” most of which are clearly just paid lists.

I never visit the App Store outside of that. If I need an app, I search for it and go directly to its listing page (yes, technically the App Store) or install it directly from my Home Screen.

I'm not really sure I understand this critique. Skills and cowork are not mutually exclusive. It sits in a gap between Chat and Claude Code.

In regular Chat, I struggle to get the agent to consistently traverse certain workflows that I have. This is something that I can trivially do in Claude Code - but Claude Code wants to code (so I'm often fighting it's tendencies).

Cowork seems like it's going to allow me to use the best parts of Claude Code, without being forced to output everything to code.