The Knowledge Work AI Stack Guide

Not only are the Anthropic product names confusing, the capabilities within each product are shifting all the time.

I created a clickable, reference guide to help a clients, who are trying to level up there use of AI past chat, make sense of how to map tasks to products.

The Knowledge Work AI Stack Guide A clickable guide to understand capabilities and requirements to execute on various knowledge work tasks

In order to take a high-level view all of Anthropic's Claude products we need to introduce some terms:

  • Surfaces: The way you access the product, like "Desktop App" or "Web".
  • Environments: Where the AI agent is running, like "Laptop" or "Cloud"
  • Harnesses: What surrounds the AI model, turning it into an agent, like "Claude Chat" or "Claude Cowork"
  • Connectors: What default and configurable tools you provide to the harness/agent, like "Email Access" or "Browser"
  • Context: The text that the agent is presented with or can search, like "Your Prompt" or "Skills"
  • Triggers: What starts the agent up, like "Manual" where you start a conversation or "Schedule" where Claude Cowork routine is scheduled to do X, Y, and Z every morning at 8am.

It's a lot to hold in one's head and that's why I made the guide.

The Knowledge Work AI Stack Guide A clickable guide to understand capabilities and requirements to execute on various knowledge work tasks

In the guide you can use it a few different ways:

  1. Click item definitions

Each card/button like "Desktop app" is clickable to reveal more details about it and a "Reach for it when..." call out on every one.

  1. Build a stack

Scroll down to the widget to "Build a stack" button.

You can explore making your own stack by clicking the available options from each group. Click the "Desktop app" and see that "Claude Tag" isn't a harness you can run from the Claude Desktop app.

Click the "Local files" connector and see that this isn't possible on the "Cloud" environment.

  1. Click a Tasks + Scenario

In the same widget choose any other task button.

You can choose various tasks and scenarios to explore what stack pieces support them.

If you choose "Hand it work today" and the scenario "Deep-research a market", you can see a prescribed stack that would allow you to do work immediately without much setup which is the "Web" surface and "Claude Chat" harness.