Giving an AI YOUR computer

The most powerful way to use AI is to give it access to your computer. You do that by downloading the ChatGPT or Claude apps and picking a mode to use. ChatGPT's two agent modes are Work and Codex; Claude's are Cowork and Code. The names do not map onto each other in any way that will help you remember them. And yes, these use the same names as the Work and Cowork modes we discussed above, but operate differently, and have more features and capabilities because they can access your computer.

It is unnecessarily complicated. But Work and Cowork emphasize the finished result: you ask for a presentation, analysis, or organized collection of files, and the agent returns something for you to review. Codex and Claude Code expose the work itself: the files being changed, commands being run, tests being performed, and a detailed record of the changes. Why would you want an AI on your computer? Well, first it lets the AI do more complicated projects since it can work with many files over a longer period of time.

This is incredibly useful, since you can ask for very ambitious outcomes. I shared a lot of things I built with Fable in Claude Code, but we can get more practical. I have a new book coming out in October (which you can pre-order). It has been through rounds of professional editing and proofreading, but I gave GPT-5. 6 Sol in Codex the full PDF anyway and asked it to check it all over.

The AI worked for 30 minutes, chased down 195 references, and gave me pages of notes that would have taken a team of researchers many hours. One sign of how far AIs have come is that every one of the AI's notes was accurate and there were no hallucinated page numbers, no invented text, no errors I could spot at all. In fact, I had the opposite issue: the AI was incredibly nitpicky. Fortunately, I used my human judgment to reject these sorts of complaints, which fits the theme that working with these systems is more like managing than it is chatting.