# Claude Cowork and Claude Code Have Quietly Become My Universal Front End. More Than Excel, Jupyter or Colab. Published: 2026-06-18 **Claude Cowork (& Claude Code) have quietly become my universal front end.** More than Excel, Jupyter and Colab. From analysis, dashboards to model builds. It runs the analysis loop the way I want it. **Exploration, cleaning, combining models into an ensemble, tuning hyperparameters, validation, the whole thing.** I have it share each iteration as HTML that I review in the browser. So at the end I am not left with just a model, I also have **full documentation, written as we went**. Same process for running adhoc analysis connected to databases, dashboards, research, PDF report, decks.. All my Excel work goes through **Claude in Excel or Cowork**. Same for PowerPoint. Model builds I used to do in Jupyter and Colab, most of that now happens across **Claude Cowork & Claude Code**. Full stack builds still stay on Claude Code.. but everything else, I am using Cowork more and more. Had Cowork put together a deck on how it helps me.. take a look.. --- [tigzig.com](https://tigzig.com), the analyst's tool shed. Built AI-agent-first, point your agent at it and it figures out the rest. Humans welcome. --- ## Full Deck Content (Text Format) ### Slide 1 - I'm Claude Cowork Hand me your data and a question, and I'll pull it, clean it, analyze it, build a model, and write the whole thing up as a report or PDF. There's a good deal more I can do, too. Let me show you... ### Slide 2 - Chat could only talk. I can act. A chat assistant answers questions inside a box. As your coworker, I reach out into the real world: **your files, live data, the web, your apps**, and finish the job, not just describe it. *Read your files · pull live data · run analysis · write reports.* **How:** Talk to me the way you already do, and I do the work. ### Slide 3 - I sit on your desktop, beside your chat. I'm a desktop app, not just a browser tab. Two ways to work side by side: **Cowork** for everyday tasks, and **Claude Code** when something needs to run on your machine. **How:** Get the Claude desktop app, open Cowork, and start a session. ### Slide 4 - Just posted to the FRED API? Already on my desk. Point me at an API, and the moment a number lands, I pull it and chart it. US retail sales just posted to the FRED API: a record **$763.7B**, up **0.9%** on the month. With inflation at **4.2%**, plenty of that is higher prices, not extra spending. **How:** Point me to the API docs. Public feeds like FRED or Yahoo Finance often need no key; for others, paste the key and allow the domain in Settings. ### Slide 5 - I reach your data backends, too. I can reach your own systems two ways: straight through your API, or via an **MCP server**. Point me at tigzig.com's Tremor and I pull live data from the back end. **How:** Give me the API docs, or add your MCP server as a connector in Settings. Then just ask. ### Slide 6 - I work your files where they live. Give me access to a folder and I read, edit, rename and organise what's in it, right on your drive. The work stays where you keep it, ready to use. *Read & edit · rename & sort · tidy folders · save final output.* **How:** Pick the folders I'm allowed to touch. I'll work inside them. ### Slide 7 - Hand me a messy file. Get back a clean report. A buggy spreadsheet landed in your inbox and you need an answer fast. I clean it, check it, find the story, and hand you a tidy report. **You review the numbers, we refine, the analyst still owns the call.** *Fix broken rows · spot bad data · de-duplicate · report out.* **How:** Drop the file in a folder I can see, and tell me what you want from it. ### Slide 8 - Big data doesn't go to my head. An **11.85-million-row, 1.6GB file**? Read and analyzed in **13 seconds**, with so much headroom left I could take more than double that. Only the results come back to me, never the whole file, so the file's size is not the limit. **How:** Just point me at the file. Past a few hundred MB I switch to querying it directly, instead of loading the whole thing into memory. ### Slide 9 - I don't just fetch. I analyze. I explore before I conclude, cutting the data every way to see what's really going on, and I show you the results as I go. Here I overlaid two views of US unemployment to surface what one chart alone would hide. **How:** Tell me the question. I'll dig in and show you results as I go. ### Slide 10 - I don't stop at charts. I build models. Point me at a target and I train on the whole file, then validate it on held-out data. *Gradient boosting · scikit-learn · ROC, gains, confusion.* **How:** Tell me what to predict. I'll train it, validate it, and show the curves. ### Slide 11 - I run the stats, too, and tell you what holds up. Response rates, conversion rates, A/B tests, the bread and butter of marketing. I run the test and tell you whether the difference is **real, not just noise**. **How:** Give me the two groups. I'll run the test and call it. ### Slide 12 - I show my work, and we iterate. No black box, and no one-shot. I share the exploration first, the missing values, the oddities, the data issues, as **a page you can open right in your browser**. We fix and refine, then build the model, then tune it together. *EDA & missing values · open it in your browser · we refine together.* **How:** Ask me to share the exploration as a page you can open in your browser. ### Slide 13 - I package it the way you need to send it. A clean one-pager or a multi-page report, then out as whatever the moment needs, including a **PDF with clickable links**. **How:** Just say the format: HTML, PDF, Word, PowerPoint or Excel. ### Slide 14 - I'll build you a live dashboard. Not just a static report, a page you reopen tomorrow and it **pulls fresh data each time**. A tracker, a metrics page, a queue you keep coming back to. *Live tracker · metrics page · refreshes itself.* **How:** Ask for "a live page I can reopen". It pulls fresh data each time. ### Slide 15 - I read the real web page, not a snippet. Give me a link and I open the actual web page and fetch the whole thing with my own tools, the **real text**, not just a short search summary. So I can quote it properly and cut down on guesswork. *Open the real URL · read the whole page · less guesswork.* **How:** Give me the link or the topic. I'll open the page and read it. ### Slide 16 - I run on a schedule. Set it once and walk away. A morning briefing, a weekly data refresh, a Monday status check, I'll run it on time and have the result waiting for you. *Daily briefing · weekly refresh · month-end report.* **How:** Say "every morning at 7" or "every Monday", and I'll set it up. ### Slide 17 - I'll drive your browser and desktop. When a tool has no tidy API, I'll use it the way you would, clicking through a website or a desktop app to get the thing done. **How:** Ask me to open a site or app. I'll connect to your browser when you're ready. ### Slide 18 - I remember you. Tell me your style once, your fonts, your colours, the way you like reports, and I carry it forward. Point me at a preferences file in your project, or just say *"remember this"*. *Your style · a preferences file · across sessions.* **How:** Point me to your preferences file, or say "remember this", and I apply it next time. ### Slide 19 - What's in my toolkit. A **private Python sandbox** - roughly **4GB of memory and 10GB of disk** to work in. Install almost anything from PyPI - the whole Python data and ML stack is open to me. - **Data:** pandas, polars and pyarrow, to wrangle files far bigger than memory. - **Models & charts:** scikit-learn for machine learning, matplotlib for the visuals. - **Images and more:** OpenCV and Pillow for image work, and since almost any package installs, audio and other toolkits are a step away. *The fine print:* the very biggest packages (XGBoost, TensorFlow, up to ~600MB) can run past the current 45-second install window and not finish; most install in seconds. Beyond the sandbox, I plug into your tools - **Gmail, Drive, Slack, Notion**, and a growing list of data providers, whatever's been made available. And for your own systems, custom connectors through **MCP servers**. ### Slide 20 - What I can't do (and the handoff). I can't run code directly on your laptop, and I won't move money or place trades. For code that has to run on your machine, my teammate **Claude Code** handles it: I write the instructions, it executes them. *No code on your machine · no trades or transfers · Claude Code, same team.* **How:** Claude Code sits right there, in the desktop app or in VS Code. Hand it the note and it runs on your machine. ### Slide 21 - How Amar works with me. Amar runs an AI-agent-first shop at [tigzig.com](https://tigzig.com). He points me at data, on Tremor and public APIs, I draft, analyse and build, and Claude Code executes on his machine. I've built him HTML one-pagers, PDF reports and models. **How:** Visit tigzig.com for free data and APIs. Want me to explore it? I can reach the site directly from Cowork. ### Slide 22 - Resources Everything above runs in Claude's Cowork mode. The guides, and a couple of good reads: - **Cowork, the product:** [claude.com/product/cowork](https://claude.com/product/cowork) - **Getting started with Cowork (best practices):** [claude.com/blog/best-practices-for-getting-started-with-claude-cowork](https://claude.com/blog/best-practices-for-getting-started-with-claude-cowork) - **Why HTML beats Markdown**, by Thariq Shihipar (Anthropic): [claude.com/blog/using-claude-code-the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-html](https://claude.com/blog/using-claude-code-the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-html) - **Let Claude use your computer:** [support.claude.com](https://support.claude.com) [tigzig.com](https://tigzig.com) - the analyst's tool shed · AI-agent first · 40+ live apps · 200+ build guides · security checklist · MCP & API servers. Point Claude Code or any AI agent at it, and it picks up the work for you. ### Slide 23 - By the way, I made this too This whole deck was built in Cowork as HTML, then exported to a PDF. Same tools, same desk. *Claude Cowork, with Amar Harolikar · tigzig.com* --- *Amar Harolikar · Decision Sciences & Applied AI · [tigzig.com](https://tigzig.com).*