AI Guides › Playbooks
By Nigel Guy · 6 min read
Most people meet Claude in one place, the chat window, and quietly decide that is the whole product. So every job gets typed into the same box: a spreadsheet to tidy, a pitch deck to lay out, a bug to hunt. Some of it works, which is why the habit survives. The rest comes back as a long wall of text you then have to copy somewhere and rebuild by hand.
The rule: pick the room by the thing you want at the end, not by the room you already have open. A reply, a changed codebase, a finished file set and a visual are four different outputs, and Anthropic now has a place built for each.
"Rooms" is our word, not Anthropic's. Underneath, the same Claude models do the thinking. What changes is what Claude can touch and what it hands back. Per Anthropic's own documentation at time of writing:
| Room | What it is | You get | Needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Chat (claude.ai and the apps) | Conversation on web, desktop and mobile | Answers, drafts, analysis, files created in-conversation | Free plan works; paid plans raise limits |
| 2. Claude Code | An agentic coding tool that reads a codebase, edits files, runs commands | Changed code, tests run, commits and pull requests | Paid Claude plan or Anthropic Console account |
| 3. Claude Design | Visual work made by conversation: prototypes, one-pagers, slides | A design you refine, then export | Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise (beta) |
| 4. Cowork | Multi-step task agent for non-coding knowledge work | Finished documents, organised files, synthesised research | Paid plans only |
Chat is where you ask, argue, draft and revise. It is the right room when the output is words you will read and then take elsewhere: an email, an outline, an explanation, a second opinion. It is the wrong room when you catch yourself pasting its output into six other tools to assemble the result.
Anthropic describes Claude Code as a tool that reads your codebase, edits files, runs commands and works with your development tools. It runs in the terminal, in VS Code and JetBrains, in a desktop app and in the browser at claude.ai/code. All of those share the same engine, so a project's CLAUDE.md instructions and settings carry across. A subscription or Console account is needed for most surfaces; the Free chat plan does not include it. The beginner trap: it is not only for professional developers, but it does act on real files and run real commands, so start in a copy of a project, not your only copy.
Anthropic's help centre says Claude Design lets you create designs, interactive prototypes, one-pagers and similar visual work by chatting with Claude. You open it at claude.ai/design or from the sidebar in Claude Desktop. It can pick up brand assets and import a design system, and exports include PDF, PowerPoint, standalone HTML and ZIP, with handoff to Claude Code for building. It launched in April 2026 as a research preview from Anthropic Labs and is described in the help centre as beta. The documented limits matter: no version history, simultaneous multi-person editing is unreliable, and large codebases can slow it down. It is not on the Free plan, and on Enterprise it is off until an owner turns it on.
Cowork takes the agentic approach from Claude Code and points it at work that is not code. You describe an outcome, and Claude plans and carries out multi-step work: formatted documents, spreadsheets, organised folders, research write-ups. You choose the folders and tools it can reach, and deleting anything needs your approval, according to Anthropic's launch post. It is on paid plans only. Anthropic's help article says sessions run in the cloud, can be scheduled, and sync across devices, and that chat and Cowork now share one home. Availability varies by surface and plan, so check the Cowork help article before you plan around the mobile or Chrome versions.
Rooms 2 to 4 sit behind a paid plan. At time of writing Anthropic's pricing page lists Pro at $20 a month, or $17 a month billed annually (about £15 at time of writing), and Max from $100 a month (about £75 at time of writing). The page showed only dollar prices when we checked, so confirm the pound price, and any VAT, at checkout. Usage is one shared pool: Anthropic says Design draws from the same limits as chat, Claude Code and Cowork. A heavy afternoon in one room can use up the allowance you wanted for another.
Ask these in order and stop at the first yes.
If none of those is a yes, stay in chat. The point is to leave chat when the output stops being text, not to abandon it.
Say you run a small bakery and want a wholesale offer. In chat you work out the pricing logic and the wording of the offer. In Claude Design you turn that into a one-page offer sheet and export a PDF. In Cowork you point Claude at a folder of last quarter's order spreadsheets and ask for a summary of your ten biggest accounts, and you review it before using it. If the bakery site needs a new order form, that goes to Claude Code, working on a copy of the site files. One project, four rooms, each doing the part it is shaped for.