Coté

Here’s a cynical, but good overview of Anthropic’s attempt to use Claude code for generic knowledge work, a tool called Cowork. One part:

Cowork may find fans among knowledge workers who have to create presentations but take no pride in their work.

Come on.

This is an application of that caustic Protestant belief that godliness requires suffering and pain. At the very least a bunch of tedious bullshit. The easy path is the Devil’s work.

Sometimes easy is greatness. This gets more true as you get older. E.g. “this overnight success only took 20 years.” In fact, isn’t making things easier, like, the point of…everything?

See also: “spellcheck and digital publishing, for those who take no pride in their writing and lithography.”

Original: Anthropic floats Claude Cowork for office work automation. See also a coverage round-up of Claude Cowork.

No, no…AI won’t replace you.

A person using AI will replace you and 4,999 other people.

I wasn’t really sure what hardned images were, let alone “distroless,” so Tony and I were lucky to get William on this week’s Tanzu Catsup to sort it out. We also discuss how it fits into platform engineering.

All dads are ethnic dads.

Facebook shutting down metaverse.

It’s fine to use your mountains of spare cash (and voting control) to try out new things. We’re all about innovation and expect it; you have to embrace lots of failure, giant failure.

The actual problem is then discarding all the people you hired to help you. It shucks the “with great valuations comes great responsibility” principle that big tech shits on. (Except, maybe Google and a little bit Microsoft?)

Also, once again, we show that VR/cyberspace is a solution that will never find its problem.

🔗 RIP the metaverse

Relevant to your interests, Tuesday

• 3 + 4 - On the three day work week.
• AWS in 2026: The Year of Proving They Still Know How to Operate - “Internal documents reportedly show 69-81% ‘regretted attrition’–meaning the people leaving are the ones Amazon desperately wanted to keep. Where have the senior engineers who’ve been through this dance before gone? They’ve walked out the door with decades of hard-won knowledge about how AWS’s systems actually work when everything’s on fire at 3 AM.”
• Joint statement from Google and Apple - Apple to officially use Gemini, though still host it on its own infrastructure (I think). Also, very weird press release. The title is like an after thought, rather, not even a thought. I mean, I’m sure it’s all incredibly thought through, which is what makes it so much the weirder.
• My town looks okay, for now (photos) - ‘I wonder why the river is called “Varmá” (literally “Warm River” in Icelandic)?’
• These 36 Airlines Offer iPhone Feature That Helps Find Your Lost Bags - A practical, everyday use of computers.
• Welcome to the Party: Why Healthcare AI Needs More Than a Chat Box - Advanced product thinking for AI healthcare apps and workflows.
• How Home Depot, Wayfair executives are preparing for an agentic AI future - Home Depot’s experiments with AI. At the moment, better search and finding out what projects people are working on. The second leading to more sales and stickyness/loyalty, I guess.

“cradle-to-crematorium biography” The best non-fiction to read this year