Last week I was playing around with Claude Code and Claude Cowork (yes, I am late to the party). That's why in today's newsletter let's talk about the difference, how to set it up and what to use it for.

Claude (claude.ai) — The One You Probably Already Know

Similar to ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, Claude.ai - is the chat interface. You open it, you type, it responds. You can ask it to write an email, explain a concept, review your code, help you think through a problem.

It's conversational. You're in the loop on every decision. The output is always text or a file or an artifact (which is interactive charts, code playgrounds, mini apps that run right inside the chat). Nothing happens on your computer without you copy-pasting it there yourself.

This is what most people mean when they say "I use Claude."

Before we proceed, a little bit of advertising. Your clicks on the ads help me to cover the newsletter hosting fee. Thank you for your support.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Anniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

Claude Code — For Developers

Claude Code is a command line tool. You install it, open your terminal, and it can read your entire codebase, write code, run tests, fix bugs, and commit changes — autonomously.

You're not chatting. You're delegating. You tell it "find all the bugs in this repo" or "write me a scraper for this site" and it goes off and does it. It has direct access to your file system and terminal.

This is why developers love it — and why it hit $1B in annualised revenue faster than ChatGPT did after launch.

It's powerful. It's also autonomous, which means it can make consequential changes fast.

Best for: software engineers and developers who want an AI that actually does the work in their codebase.

How to install Claude Code

You need a paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise). Free plan doesn't include it.

You can work with it via Terminal, IDE like VS Code or Claude Desktop app.

In order to install it in your terminal, you can find documentation here https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview

Simply copy a line of code, paste into the terminal, hit enter and wait. Once it is done, Claude Code will ask you to select the theme, log in in to Claude and you are good to go. Just type claude in the terminal and chat to it.

If anything breaks, run claude doctor — it auto-detects most issues.

If you want to install it via VS Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/), go to the extensions and find Claude Code.

Extensions look like squares on the left hand side. Then search for ‘Claude Code for VS Code’ - find the one that has over 5 million downloads and hit Install.

Once it is downloaded, you will see Claude logo in the right corner. You need to authorise Claude and it’s done.

In my opinion this is the easiest option for beginners. Download the app, and you will find Code tab at the top

Claude Cowork — Claude Code for the Rest of Us

Cowork is the newest one, released in January 2026, and still in beta.

Think of it as Claude Code but for non-developers — no terminal, no installation, no code. It lives inside the Claude desktop app. You just talk to it, and it handles multi-step tasks on your computer.

Give it a folder of 200 PDFs and tell it to extract data into a spreadsheet. Ask it to reorganise your Downloads folder. Have it draft, format, and save a report. It handles the whole workflow autonomously — reading files, creating files, moving things around — all inside a secure, sandboxed virtual machine so it can't accidentally mess with your system. You can also schedule tasks — perform something every Monday or once a month.

Use cases I tested: go to my Documents folder and organise files by context into various folders — invoices, personal documents, educational materials. It even created a subfolder to separate my UAE documents vs Australian. In one of my previous emails I shared a Python script that can organise files by type — pdf, jpeg, xlsx. Cowork can read the file to organise it by substance.

Other use case — analyse all February invoices, create a spreadsheet with the data: Vendor, Invoice date, Amount, Due date.

Best for: knowledge workers, analysts, project managers who want automation without touching a terminal.

How to install Cowork

Cowork is not a separate app — it's built into the Claude Desktop app.

One important thing: the app needs to stay open while Cowork is running. Close it and the task stops.

So Which One Do You Need?

Probably all three at different times.

Use Claude when you're thinking, writing, analysing, or exploring — any task where the output is a response.

Use Claude Code when you want AI to actually build something for you — an app, a script, an agent. You don't need to understand code. You just describe what you want and it writes, runs and fixes everything itself.

Use Cowork when you have repetitive file and task work on your computer and don't want to write code to automate it.

Let me know if you want a Claude Code dedicated tutorial newsletter:

Keep pushing 💪,

Karina

Need more help?

Just starting with Python? Wondering if programming is for you?

Master key data analysis tasks like cleaning, filtering, pivot and grouping data using Pandas, and learn how to present your insights visually with Matplotlib with ‘Data Analysis with Python’ masterclass.

Building your portfolio?
Grab the Complete EDA Portfolio Project — a full e-commerce analysis (ShopTrend 2024) with Python notebook, realistic dataset, portfolio template, and step-by-step workflow. See exactly how to structure professional portfolio projects.

Grab your Pandas CheatSheet here. Everything you need to know about Pandas - from file operations to visualisations in one place.

Get CV, Portfolio and LinkedIn Review.

More from me: YouTube | TikTok | Instagram | Threads | LinkedIn