The Future of Work: Claude Cowork

Want to ditch the endless back-and-forth cycle of project management and actually get work done? 

Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson just redesigned their entire 12-page website in under two hours, without hiring a designer, developer, or agency.

If you've ever felt bottlenecked by the slow cycle of copy revisions, design feedback, and technical implementation, this conversation will change how you think about AI collaboration. The hosts discovered the difference between chatting with AI and having AI actually do the work. 

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How Cowork differs from Chat and why it's like having IT support show up at your desk
• Real examples from their two-week experiment including DNS management, calendar scheduling, and n8n automation
• The Pencil.dev + Webflow integration that turned a 6-month project into a 2-hour sprint
• How the "skills" system works like video game cartridges for repeatable workflows
• Why human expertise still matters for the final 20% that moves the needle
• MCP server connections that let Claude work inside your actual business tools

If you're ready to stop being a human copy-paste machine and start leveraging AI that actually executes your vision, this episode shows you exactly how to make the shift.

Mentioned in this episode:

Want to better understand the infrastructure behind all this?

Alane points back to a recent episode "Want to Automate? APIs and Webhooks are Everything" for a deeper dive into APIs, MCPs, and webhooks.

Want to learn more? Join us for a free 30-minute webinar on Claude Cowork on March 18 at 2:30 pm CST. Register here.

Tools/Platforms mentioned in this episode:

• Claude Desktop (Cowork feature)
• Pencil.dev
• Webflow
• Cloudflare
• n8n
• ClickUp
• Asana
• Monday.com
• MCP servers
• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• YouTube
• Command line interface

Disclosure: Some links are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the podcast!

For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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Transcript

Micah Johnson (00:01)
We redesigned and rebuilt our entire website in under two hours with no developer, no designer, and we didn't even hire an agency to do this. And that's not even the most useful thing that Claude Desktop did for us this week.

Alane Boyd (00:17)
So, Micah, this might be the first time that our listeners have heard about Claude Desktop. So, let's explain the difference between regular chatting and Desktop before we get into the really cool shit we've been doing with it.

Micah Johnson (00:29)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is so confusing for so long. I even looked at this and went, why would I use Cowork versus just chatting with it? And you know, the, the real difference is that chat is awesome for, you know, chatting. I don't know how else to explain it. It's like Q&A, "Hey Claude, what do you think about this?" Or, you know, do some quick web search and come up with something.

Alane Boyd (00:53)
What is it?

Micah Johnson (00:57)
It kind of stops there. Like, yeah, you can connect to some of your things, but you end up still doing a lot of copy and paste and then you do the work. So. Cowork is kind of the opposite of that. You have to download Claude Desktop to get Claude Cowork. It's it is now available on PC and Mac. used to just be Mac, but beyond just answering the questions, now it can get access to your.

file system on your hard drive and work inside of your tools and other desktop apps that you have open that you can connect it to. And it can actually do the work by connecting the APIs and MCP servers. And even if that sounds super confusing, we'll talk about how all this works later in the episode. But just to give you the idea, instead of copying and pasting, now all of a sudden it's jumping into your browser, filling out form fields, looking at what's going on, analyzing, hey,

Did I do it correctly? Building itself plans, it is nuts.

Alane Boyd (01:56)
It is, and the most simple way to say this is that it's acting agentic without having to be a technical person that's building it. And you're still just conversating and writing prompts with Claude. It's really conversational and Claude Desktop and Cowork is doing the work for you.

Micah Johnson (02:16)
Yeah, if you've used any of the newer models like Sonnet 4.6 or Opus 4.6 on Claude, you've probably noticed that when you start chatting, it'll go, hey, let me ask you a few questions first and give you like multiple choice options or let you fill in the blank because it's already thinking through like, what does the user really mean? I need to get some more context.

Alane Boyd (02:41)
Mm-hmm. And like my favorite way to kind of give you some context into this. It's like when you have a question, you can't figure out something on your computer and you text or message the IT person and have to go back and forth trying to figure it out. And instead, with Claude Desktop using Cowork, they just show up at your desk and they fix it for you.

Micah Johnson (03:03)
Yeah, that was a great illustration of the difference like chatting.

Alane Boyd (03:06)
It's like, gosh, it's

just gonna be taken care of for me. I don't have to deal with all this. I can just tell it the problems that I'm having and not only is it gonna answer me, but it's gonna do the work.

Micah Johnson (03:14)
Yes. In fact, I used this exact thing this morning, Alane I could have gone to Claude chat and said, Hey, walk me through step-by-step on how to redirect this domain, but save the email and we're using Cloudflare and give me the step-by-step process. And then I do the work following it step-by-step and hope that it works. But I went to Claude Cowork and I asked it to do the same thing. And it goes, Hey,

You know, you want me to open up Cloudflare in your browser? I said, sure. And so it opened up Cloudflare. I logged in. I got it to the right page that it told me to go to once I logged in. And then it goes, let me take a look at the current settings. Oh, I don't see it all. Let me scroll down the page. Okay. All right. I've got a good idea on how to do this. Would you like me to go ahead and edit these DNS entries? Here's what I'm going to do. I'm like, yes.

and I could watch it work inside of my browser and set it up. Now would you like me to set up the redirect rules for you? Sure. And it just went step by step, validating with me along the way. I can watch what it's doing in the browser and it set up everything. I didn't touch it and it worked perfectly.

Alane Boyd (04:31)
I mean, the bane of my existence is DNS settings. So I love that example. I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot, but I mean, it is a pain to have to deal with that setting up new domains. Yeah, I mean, it's just like so tedious.

Micah Johnson (04:35)
That's it. You lead a cushy life, Alane. The bane of my existence is DNS records.

It is, it's scary. It is scary.

Yeah. But now it's like, okay, I know what it's going to, it's going to tell me what it's going to do before it does it. It's got a great bedside manner and then it's doing it inside of my browser. didn't connect it to Cloudflare's API or MCP server. It literally worked inside my browser and validated that everything that it did was correct.

Alane Boyd (04:58)
you

That was gonna be one of my questions is that if it was connecting through MCP, so it was just acting on your behalf in the browser. That's incredible.

Micah Johnson (05:17)
Yes, yes, in

the browser. And that's only accessible when you have the downloaded Cloud Desktop app installed.

Alane Boyd (05:25)
And I don't remember if we actually explained. one of the things is you can just download. It's a free app to download Claude Desktop. And then within that is the Cowork. Toggle that you can use so very, very simple. This is not a difficult thing to set up.

Micah Johnson (05:38)
Yeah. Yep.

Yeah, it's literally you download it, start it, log into your Anthropic account for Claude. And at the top you'll see Chat, Cowork and Code. And so what we're talking about right now is the one in the middle Cowork.

Alane Boyd (05:57)
And Micah, I loved your example about Cloudflare and how it took care of the DNS stuff. I mean, we've been using this for the last couple of weeks pretty heavily and some things that were taking hours or weeks or months to do that it could do in five minutes or a few hours. And one of them was, we've launched these AI Cohorts and and

we wanted to map out the rest of the year of the cohorts. so trying to check all of our calendars, see when we can do it, schedule four weeks, get it, and just the amount of human error that can happen in like these tedious little things. And we used Claude Desktop to do it for us. And once we approved the calendar, we approved it and then it went and put it on our calendar for us.

Micah Johnson (06:46)
Yeah. So we, we literally prompt it with the requirements. Like it's a four week program. We want a week in between each cohort. We need to look at, don't even think we said like look out for holidays. We just said we need. Yeah.

Alane Boyd (07:00)
I don't think we did. think it just knew like, hey, Memorial

Day, like probably don't want to do one that day.

Micah Johnson (07:06)
Yeah. And we gave it the basic schedule. So Mondays, pre-reads, Tuesdays, our sessions, Thursdays, our breakouts and office hours. We gave it enough context to work with, and then we connected it to the calendar. And it literally sat there, reviewed everything, and then came back with a visual plan and explanation of what it suggests that it should do. And like you said, Alane, when we approved it, it then created.

all of the calendar invites and, at first I panicked. I'm like, crap, it created all these invites, but they need to be four week recurring. And so I'm like, oh shoot. Like I prompted it back and I'm like, These needed to be recurring. And its response was no worries. I already assumed that that was going to be the case and set it up that way.

Alane Boyd (07:57)
I mean, it's incredible. I mean, it saved hours of work having to manually figure out the calendar and then do all the invites and block our calendars.

Micah Johnson (08:07)
Yeah.

Yep. Yep. One of the things that we wanted as our objectives for 2026 was updating our website, Alane. And I came across a tool called Pencil.dev. Again, this is another download to your local machine application, but then connect it to Claude Desktop. And it is like Figma for design, but designed for AI. So you then prompt Claude.

Alane Boyd (08:16)
Mmm.

Micah Johnson (08:35)
who can work in this Figma front-end design-like environment. And we ended up being able to redesign our entire site through prompting with incredible, incredible design that we can edit, move around, and work with. And then we connected Claude to the design and Pencil and to our Webflow account through an MCP server.

And ask Claude to make a plan and start executing to look at the page designs and then write the actual pages in Webflow. So we got the designer element done, and then we got the development side done. And within two, two and a half hours, this entire process was completed. Absolutely mind blowing. And Webflow was like a one-to-one to the Pencil design. Now we still have to go back in

Alane Boyd (09:26)
it

Micah Johnson (09:30)
and work with images because it was placeholder images and some icons. you know, once we see it in a browser, we want to change some of the copy and different. There's like the human element that comes in now, but we didn't have all the tedious time consuming like, OK, we've got to build another class. We've got to add another div. We've got to do this, do this. And then on top of it all, you can ask Claude to say, hey,

Alane Boyd (09:41)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (09:56)
Can you check this out for SEO? Can you make sure this is gonna start showing up in results when people are talking about AI cohorts in AI chats and suddenly it's writing all the script, the schemas behind the scenes, even based on all the designs that we created? Absolutely mind blowing.

Alane Boyd (10:19)
It was, I mean, that would have been a six month project. Absolutely. no, how many pages, Micah, was it? Was it 10 or was it 14 pages that it built out?

Micah Johnson (10:22)
Easily. Easily.

I

think we ended up with 12, but a few of them are dynamic because we're redesigning the podcast pages and the blog pages and the detail pages. So those are going to be dynamic that are already feeding from the CMS. And this is on top of already experimenting with connecting Claude to the MCP server that will allow us to more easily prompt Claude and have it help us manage the database of content in our website.

Alane Boyd (10:30)
Okay.

Yeah. So I want to just like dig in on this for just a second, because this is revolutionary, fast work, like that we could do something in a few hours that is so amazing. It is not removing the need of a real Webflow expert and designer. But did we decrease the amount of work for them? Absolutely. But now their time can be spent improving

Micah Johnson (11:12)
No, no.

Alane Boyd (11:22)
instead of building things from scratch and they can move so much faster. it got us 80 % of the way there and the last 20 % we need an expert to finish. And now we have that expert that can just take that and finish building it out. And it doesn't mean that we've taken anything necessarily away from them because we can just now move so much faster. There are so many pages that we've wanted to create so much content that we wanted on there, but we're bottlenecked because there's only so much time.

Micah Johnson (11:25)
Yes.

Alane Boyd (11:50)
any human has in the day for work. And now we're going to be able to move that much faster and still utilize an expert to get us over the finish line for every idea that we have that we wanted to execute on.

Micah Johnson (12:03)
It's this last mile concept where, you know, like you said, it got us 80 % of the way, but we need to get that last mile in and really button it up and get everything that we need structured. with that, that fine tuning approach that only a human designer and developer can help us do, but all that. Setup and all that other stuff just took forever. I think about this a lot with

Alane Boyd (12:06)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (12:30)
you know, I think you use the term roadblock Alane, and think back on all the other times that we've done this. And we've employed people to help us do this. The cycle is so slow, because it goes, Hey, here's the copy that I think we should do. And then you or you and I or me or somebody else on the team has to review the copy. And then we give feedback. And then we go to version two of the copy, then we go to version three of the copy.

Alane Boyd (12:59)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (12:59)
Then

we take the copy and it's like, here's option one, two and three for designs. Okay. Then we have to review all of that, but then we've got to take our time giving all this feedback. And it's a slow, slow, slow cycle and it's painful. And we put off the validation and the reviews because it sucks and nobody wants to do that. We're accelerating all of that because we can get option A and option B in two seconds. And then we go, let's tweak it a little bit.

Alane Boyd (13:23)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (13:25)
Like it's that immediate feedback while we're working in the design stage with the AI. And if we go back to the old process for a second, what inevitably happens is you take the copy that we already approved, we put it in the design, then we look at it in the browser and we go, son of a bitch, that looks terrible. We need to change everything again, which is why it's why those things can take six months.

Alane Boyd (13:45)
⁓ God, it's just such a, yeah.

Yeah, it drags on. It's so just burden ridden. The other thing that we're talking about a lot right now is MCP servers and how these software platforms are connecting with each other. And, you know, I don't want to dig in on that in this episode, but we do have another episode where we're talking about APIs, webhooks and MCP servers. And so for any of our listeners that are getting a little bit of lost in the weeds, then you can listen to that episode. We'll link to it in the show notes .

Micah Johnson (14:18)
Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So we did that with the calendar. We did that with the We've been using Cowork to, for example, help us get transcripts from any of the videos that we record and then identify where YouTube Shorts or TikTok videos would be great. Just smaller versions of this from the transcript with timestamps, but

Not only does it just say, Hey, here's some great stuff. It actually calls command line interface on our computer and makes the clips for us. And then it uploads it to YouTube. So at that stage we can come back in and we already have it uploaded in YouTube. We already have it clipped. We already have it defined. We're just going in and refining the description. One, it already wrote the description for us based on the skill that we gave it, which

We'll also talk about skills here in a second, but we already cut out a lot of video production, work with our podcast agent that we designed and talked about before. Now we took it another level with Cowork.

Alane Boyd (15:24)
I mean, so much of our day as humans from leading up to these moments in time with agents and what we're doing with Claude Cowork is just moving information from one place to another. That's what most of our day is. Even with the website stuff, it's moving information from our head to a designer and back and forth and back and forth. And this is cutting out all of that with the video stuff. Okay, like.

Micah Johnson (15:37)
Yes.

Alane Boyd (15:52)
Let's listen to the entire video. Let's figure out as a human where the best audio clips would be like, oh my gosh, that is so much time. And then cutting it and then uploading it to YouTube. But oh my gosh, it takes a long time to do that.

Micah Johnson (16:08)
Not anymore.

Alane Boyd (16:09)
Not anymore. It did. It used to take a lot of time.

Micah Johnson (16:12)
Past tense.

Yes. Now I will say with all of these things that we're talking about, you still need a subject matter expert. For example, with the website and the design, if one of us couldn't look at the design and go, those colors clash, or this is an awful design and make those judgment calls, then this isn't a great tool. You still need to be do that. Same thing with the video. If you look at the Shorts or the clips,

Alane Boyd (16:33)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Micah Johnson (16:41)
and go, this is awful, right? You still have to make that judgment call. in.

Alane Boyd (16:47)
And even just being the expert on the information that you created the video on, know, that it still takes us being the expert at something and a videographer can still improve the videos with dropping in images or other, you know, interesting things to make the video flow before it got uploaded to YouTube. So it's like instead of taking the time to listen to the whole thing, clip it up, they can actually just spend time on being creative.

Micah Johnson (16:52)
Yes.

Alane Boyd (17:16)
and making that video section better.

Micah Johnson (17:19)
Yep. Yep. So now let's talk about one that we did this last week. That was absolutely like, I would say probably the best thing that we've done yet, which is connecting Cowork to n8n.

And now we can prompt give Claude requirements of what we want it to build. And then it goes directly into our own n8n instance using the MCP server that's connected. And we'll research all the nodes. We'll look at over 2000 templates. We'll look at design patterns that we've used before. So it's not reinventing the wheel and goes.

Here's how I think I could build this workflow. And then when we approve that, it builds it for us. So again, unlike we no longer have to manually clip stuff, we no longer have to map out every single div and every single page and every single class in each website. We no longer have to manually drop every node, connect it up, rearrange it, put in the credentials, map out all the prompts, do all of that.

Claude can do that, but again, if you don't know how n8n works, if you don't know the fundamentals, if you don't know how agents work, you're not the subject matter expert that should be running this, but you're saving time. It's exactly like if you're a developer and you have the expertise, you can leverage Claude to help you write code. But if you're not, you're to get yourself in some sticky situations.

Alane Boyd (18:52)
Right, you're just going to be hanging out in the sandbox by yourself, never building a castle. That just came to me, I don't know. But really, it does, again, it gets us 80 % of the way there, but we still need an expert. But it saves hours. Being able to just talk through your workflow with Claude and it build out, and then you can tweak it with just conversation.

Micah Johnson (18:57)
Yes, okay. Yes, love it.

Yes.

Absolutely. Or if you're getting errors, you don't even have to copy and paste the errors. You don't have to copy and paste the code. go, Hey, can you check out the last execution? I'm getting an error. What do you think that problem is? And it will go review the previous execution of the automation, check out the error, search the web, search the documentation and go, I think it's this. Here's how I would fix it. Would you like me to apply that? Yes, I would, because I'm too lazy to copy and paste this anymore.

Alane Boyd (19:19)
Why is it getting in your ear?

Mm-hmm.

So one of the things that it talks through and that it has and that you can add to it are skills. So let's just talk through what the skills are so that this helps build consistency and have some context into what it's doing.

Micah Johnson (20:03)
Yeah, yeah. So this is a little hard to explain verbally. And this is one of those things where you just gotta start using it and it becomes less abstract. But essentially, if you think about when you're communicating with an AI, you give it context, you prompt it, you give it information. And if you want it to do the same thing over and over, you have to re-prompt it over and over again. Well, skills are like, it's almost...

Alane Boyd (20:08)
It is.

Micah Johnson (20:29)
like maybe like a video game console. Like if you want to play a specific video game, you would load up that specific game and then it runs that code. And then it's always that video game with skills. It's kind of like that. You ask it to do something that goes, what skills do I have for this? Cool. Let me load that in and I'm going to run these skills. And so if it's like a review of a legal document, it's going to load its legal review skills.

And then it's going to review it. And part of the skills is produce a report in a Word doc file. Well, it doesn't inherently know how to make a Word doc file. So it loads the how to create a Word doc file skill next, and then creates the report so they can stack and work together. But each time it does this, it's loading those skills to repeat that same thing over and over again.

Alane Boyd (21:23)
I mean, this is ideal, because not only does it save you time, but that consistency. You're going to get the output that you've been wanting every time instead of having to keep tweaking, keep tweaking, because that just eats up.

Micah Johnson (21:35)
Yep. And so here's what's mind blowing, Alane. There's a skill to make skills.

Alane Boyd (21:44)
Perfect.

Micah Johnson (21:45)
Yeah. So when you run into a scenario where you're like, man, I wish this would be repeatable for Claude, you ask Claude, Hey, can you make a skill for this? It loads the skill on how to make new skills. And then it writes the skill based on all the stuff that you just did with Claude. And it went. Perfect. I've saved the skill in the folder. And now every time you asked me to do this, I will load this skill.

Alane Boyd (22:08)
And how does this work between sharing between teams? Not necessarily just the skills, but you know, a lot of teams are working together and you don't want to just be siloed with like Claude Desktop because then that's just centralized to you.

Micah Johnson (22:21)
Yeah, we should probably do a full episode just on this Alane because it really gets into like topics of, well, how should we work? Like for example, we have a lot of people right now asking us, should I have my entire team downloading Claude Desktop and leveraging all this stuff? And the short answer is yes, maybe. And the long answer is the opposite. Don't do it yet because.

Alane Boyd (22:25)
Okay.

Micah Johnson (22:48)
There's so many things into this we saw this years ago with Asana and ClickUp and Monday we would have teams and we have episodes on this as well. Like we have teams that will buy Asana for their entire team. Tell everybody on their team. OK guys, now we're using Asana. No training, no systems, no structure, nothing defined, no guidance, but somehow they expect Asana as the software that they just bought.

to magically perfect their project management operations. It doesn't.

Alane Boyd (23:20)
So I think that's

a great preview of a part two of this episode, Micah.

Micah Johnson (23:28)
Yeah. And I would say to answer your question to a degree, all the skills, their files and folders, all the, things that Claude reads files and folders. So there is, and maybe this is like a little preview of where we're going with this in the next episode, that we record on this is you can set up stuff in Dropbox or Google Drive and

Say, all right, anybody that has access to this folder can download Claude Desktop and run Claude Desktop out of this synced folder. And when things change, it syncs in the folder and then your individual Claude desktops all now have access to that. So on one side, that's starting to give structure. On the other hand, be careful of what you're putting in there because everybody that has access to that folder can have it. And then that's building out.

the start of how you share this across a team.

Alane Boyd (24:24)
So to wrap this all up, I think a lot of people learn by just trying things out. So just go, it's free. Go download Claude Desktop, try out Cowork, play around with it, get some ideas, see what your roadblocks are, see what you're not getting, try out skills. And then if you're really wanting to dig in, one of our last week's AI Mastermind that we have, we actually dug into real examples, pulled up Claude Cowork and we're showing how to use it. And it was an amazing conversation.

Other people shared their experiences and how they've been using it. Some shared their screen even and dug in. So it's a really great way if you are a leader or a founder that wants to dig into these and actually see what people are doing and how it works, shoot us a note because you might be great to check out our AI Mastermind that we have.