Is there any reason to use Cowork over Claude Code if you're not coding?
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I'm not a developer. I've been using Claude Code for a few months now to build small apps and I've enjoyed it more than I expected. I'm even working on few startups!
The part I like most is that it works on my actual machine. It reads my project files, picks up my CLAUDE.md, and I've built up a pile of skills and slash commands living in ~/.claude. All of that just loads.
A lot of my work isn't coding though. Writing, advocacy, committee work, that sort of thing. No repo involved. On paper that sounds like exactly what Cowork is for.
But I can't work out what I'd gain. As far as I can tell Cowork sessions run in the cloud by default (although you can point it to a project folder), so they never see my local skills, only the ones enabled on my claude.ai account.
The Cowork cloud versus local thing confuses me most. Same app, two doors. I'm never quite sure which one I'm actually in. Sometime it feel like it doesnt read my files.
So if you do mostly non-coding work, is there something Cowork does better that I'm missing? eg in writing or brainstorming?
Also I've thought to point both to the same folder and let Code and Cowork access it and experiment with that. Good or bad?