There are four Claudes now — Chat, Cowork, Code, and Design. Each does a completely different job. Most people are still using one. Here's when to reach for each, and how to chain them.
You're probably stuck on Chat. That was the only Claude that existed for a long time, and it's the one everyone defaults to. It's also the wrong tool for at least half of what people use it for.
There are now four distinct Claude products, and they're built for completely different jobs. Chat thinks with you. Cowork does the work on your machine. Code builds apps and automations. Design creates the visual stuff. Picking the wrong one is why your output feels generic — you're asking the thinking tool to do the building.
The real unlock isn't any single Claude. It's chaining all four — using each one for what it actually does, then handing the output to the next.
This page is the cheat sheet: a side-by-side of what each Claude does, what it can access, when to reach for it, an example prompt per tool, and the chained workflows that combine all four.
The conversational Claude. Writing, brainstorming, analysis, decision-making, learning, processing documents. You talk through ideas, it pressure-tests them. You paste in a doc, it summarises and asks the questions you didn't.
Web search, uploaded files (PDFs, docs, images, code), Projects for persistent custom context, and Artifacts for documents and code that live inside the chat.
Drafting copy. Working through a hard decision. Learning a new domain fast. Pressure-testing a strategy. Synthesising a pile of notes. Anywhere you'd otherwise spend an hour with a whiteboard or a smart friend.
Operates your computer for you. Clicks through your browser, opens and edits files, runs through multi-step workflows, processes data at volume, and schedules recurring tasks. Where Chat tells you what to do, Cowork actually does it.
Your screen and browser. Local files and folders. Scheduled task runners. Anything a person could do clicking around your desktop — Cowork can do it without you sitting there.
Repetitive multi-step workflows. Pulling data out of tools without APIs. Cleaning and renaming a folder of files. Running the same checklist every Monday. Anywhere you'd otherwise hire a VA or block out an afternoon to "just get through it".
Reads, writes, and refactors actual code. Builds features, scripts, automations, and full apps from a plain-English description. Runs tests. Debugs. Ships. Lives in your terminal or as an extension inside VS Code and JetBrains.
Your repo, your local environment, your packages and dependencies, your tests, your deploy commands. It can grep, edit, run, and commit — the whole loop a developer runs, with you reviewing instead of typing.
Shipping a feature. Refactoring. Debugging something gnarly. Building a personal tool you'd otherwise pay for. Automating a dev workflow. Spinning up a quick script that pulls one number from one place and posts it somewhere else.
Generates visual assets from descriptions. Pitch decks, landing-page mockups, social graphics, brand explorations, 3D scenes, product visualisations. You describe what you want — Design produces it.
Your prompt, reference images you upload, brand guidelines you give it, and an iterative loop where you push back on specific elements and it revises.
Pitch decks. Landing page mockups before you build the page. Social tiles. Product mockups for a Figma you don't want to draw. Any visual where the prompt is clearer than the pixels — and where you'd otherwise outsource or bounce ideas off Canva for an hour.
Use Chat to think through the spec — what the tool does, what it doesn't, where it can fail. Then hand a clean, written spec to Code and let it build. The output is dramatically better than asking Code to figure out both the design and the implementation in one go.
Cowork is great at pulling raw inputs but not at synthesis. Let it gather the data, dump it into a doc, then take that doc into Chat for the actual thinking. One pulls, one processes.
Mock the visual in Design first. Once you've locked the layout, hand the mockup and the copy to Code and ask it to build the real thing in HTML/CSS. Skipping the Design step is why your landing pages look engineered, not designed.
Chat decides what needs to happen — the sequence, the checks, the edge cases. Cowork then executes the steps without you sitting there. This is how a single chat turns into half a day of work done while you're elsewhere.
Trying to do all four jobs in Chat. It can fake the other three, but the output stays in the chat window — no file on disk, no app shipped, no deck to share. Chat is the thinking partner. The other three are the hands.
Book a call. I'll either do the work myself, advise you through it, or connect you with the right person in my network. Every problem gets a path forward.
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