Where the Work Lives

A third commenter calls it "the intended design, not a bug": Cowork sessions "run in the cloud regardless of where you start them," and "local file access needs the desktop app open as a bridge." By that account, where a task is started decides whether local folders are in reach at all. Another commenter, who upgraded Claude Desktop when it prompted them, asks "Did Anthropic just break Cowork?" after Cowork "asked me to reauthorize all the project folders it has been accessing without issue for months" and then "insists it has no access to do anything outside of its cloud sandbox." For someone whose work sat in local folders, the open question is whether the product changed or something else did.

The sandbox is where the explanations get specific. A commenter says Cowork "will automatically open up a virtual sandbox if it doesn't have permissions" and "doesn't necessarily tell the user." On that commenter's account, the sandbox is something the product can enter on its own without telling the person. Someone who was "struggling with this for a couple weeks" traces the failure to Windows, saying "Cowork's sandbox needs Windows' virtualization stack," which "isn't registered or running" on the machine "even though Claude itself installed fine." In that second account the sandbox has nothing to run on. Either way, where the work runs is a layer a person has to discover.

Placed beside Claude Code, Cowork gets described by what can't be seen. One commenter's understanding is that Cowork is "basically the exact same thing" as Code, except "you just can't really see what it is doing." For this person the hidden part is the work itself. Another, describing how to get summaries from an earlier session, says "There seems to be a sort of sandbox" and "only chats can see chats, cowork can see cowork and code can see code." For this one what can't be seen is a session of another kind.

People who keep their notes in Obsidian settle the question with a folder, and one arrangement shows how. A commenter keeps an "Obsidian vault that Cowork lives in" beside "a separate work folder that code lives in," with code starting in the work folder and getting "it information from the vault," and sets it up this way because "Obsidian only likes .md files" while the work folder holds everything from ".fbx files to .png files." The split follows the kind of file: the vault takes the markdown and the work folder takes files such as .fbx and .png, so where the work lives is decided by what it is made of. A person who says "I don't know how an agent works" set up "my entire Cowork folder as an Obsidian vault" so they can edit files and fill out questionnaires Cowork has generated, then tell Claude when they are done. In both, the work sits in files that someone can open without Cowork, and the person decides which folder it sits in.

Where the work gets checked is another thing people settle for themselves. A commenter says their Cowork "maintains a matter record from start to finish with full context," and that their agents "spawn independent subagents to verify everything." That puts the check inside the tool's own process, with more of the tool doing the checking. Someone who wrote up an experiment says Claude Code and Cowork "feel like magic" but that on serious analysis the result can be "a sleight-of-hand trick": "Claude found patterns in the data when it was pure noise." That one puts the check outside the tool, in an experiment the person ran to see what it does when there is nothing to find.

Finding finished work takes a map too. A commenter tells someone to open the "cowork" tab on their phone: "They could be in there," and it "happened to me and I didn't even use the cowork feature." So work can turn up under a feature a person says they never used. A person who tracked down a desktop-app crash reports that a full uninstall and reinstall deleted their Claude Code session history and their recurring tasks in Cowork, and warns "your sessions live in the app's data folder." Where sessions matter to a person, they sit wherever the app put them, and a reinstall can take them.

People also trade rules for dividing the work. One commenter's is "Give each tool one clear job": Claude chat for planning, Cowork for gathering and summarizing documents, Claude Code for building one small task at a time, with shared files carrying the goal, the structure and the next task. The rule is a division of labour, and the files are what carry the plan from one tool to the next. Someone else says to plan in chat, where you can say whether you think Cowork or Code is the best fit, and to "go back and forth in chat" until Claude has designed the process. Both put the decision about where work belongs in the person's own plan, ahead of any tool.

One user who finds Cowork expensive and says they run out of limits asks for another desktop app that can read and edit the local files Cowork writes to, which they view in Obsidian. When a person's own folders and plans are what organise the work, the tool becomes the part that can be swapped, and the folders are what stay.