What Is Claude AI? A Beginner’s Guide to Chat, Cowork & Code

A lot of people have heard of Claude AI but aren’t quite sure what it actually is or where to start with it.

Not confused about whether it’s good. More confused about what the different parts do and how to actually use them.

I’ve done two videos on it now and the questions keep coming. So I thought I’d write it all out properly — a beginner’s guide to what Claude AI can do and how to get started.

The three tabs

When you open the Claude desktop app, you’ll see three options at the top.

Chat. Cowork. Code.

Think of them as three completely separate tools that just happen to live in the same app. Each one does something different.

Chat

Chat is the one most people start with. You’re just talking to an AI — asking questions, getting answers.

I use it like a smarter version of Googling something. Research, finding information quickly, working through a problem I don’t know the answer to. Stuff like that.

Here’s something that changed how I use it: instead of trying to ask the perfect question, I just describe what I’m trying to do and say “ask me any relevant questions” at the end.

So instead of sitting there for ten minutes trying to figure out the right prompt, I write one sentence and let Claude figure out what it needs to know.

Say you want to fix the Wi-Fi in your house. You could just type: “I want to make the Wi-Fi in my home faster. I currently have one router on the ground floor. Ask me any relevant questions”.

Claude will come back asking how big your house is, what problems you’re actually experiencing, what your current internet speed is.

Things you probably wouldn’t have thought to mention. And from that, you get a much better answer than if you’d just asked something vague.

You really don’t need to overthink the prompting side of it either. A lot of people feel like they need to write these long detailed prompts to get good results. You don’t. Start with something simple, let it ask questions, and go from there.

A good example of how useful Chat can be for everyday stuff — ask it to make you a meal prep plan for the week and put it in a table. It’ll come back with a colour-coded breakdown of every meal, every day. Ask it to turn that into a PDF and you can print it out and stick it on your fridge. Two minutes, done.

One thing I’ve found useful for prompting — I’ve been using a tool called Wispr Flow. It’s a voice dictation tool that works in any app. Notion, Gmail, Claude, whatever you’re typing in. You just speak and it types for you. It’s about four times faster than typing and it learns how you talk over time. I mainly use it for longer prompts and when I’m scripting videos. Saves a lot of time.

On models — when you’re in Chat, you can choose which version of Claude you’re talking to. For most things, Sonnet 4.6 is fine. It’s fast and gives good answers. I only switch to Opus 4.6 when I need it to work through something more complex or technical. It’s slower but puts in more effort. For day to day questions, stick with Sonnet.

Cowork

Cowork is the one most people haven’t touched yet. Which is a shame because it’s probably the most useful for everyday tasks.

You give Claude access to a folder on your computer. Whatever files are in that folder — PDFs, spreadsheets, Word docs, anything — Claude can read through them and work with them.

Here’s a real example. Say you have a folder of bank statements and you need to know how much interest you’ve made across all of them. Normally you’d have to open each one, find the number, add it all up yourself. With Cowork, you just tell Claude what you want to know and it goes through every single file and gives you the answer. The whole thing takes less than a minute.

I’ve used it to pull specific information out of big folders of documents, combine files together, organise things, and even feed it a load of old stuff I’ve written so it can learn my writing style and help me write new things that actually sound like me.

One thing worth knowing — Cowork only works on your computer. It doesn’t sync to your phone because it’s reading files that are stored locally. That’s just how it works.

Code

Code is what I use the most out of everything.

I want to be upfront — I’m not a developer. I don’t know how to code properly and I’ve never wanted to learn. Six months ago, opening the Terminal on my Mac felt genuinely intimidating.

But Claude Code has changed what I’m actually able to build. You give it a folder, tell it what you want, and it writes all the code and builds it for you.

Quick example — I created an empty folder, told Claude to make me a simple personal website using the Inter font, and a couple of minutes later there was a working site I could preview in my browser.

But it goes way further than that. I built the whole Digital Creator Club platform with it — a website with a paywall, user accounts, Discord integration, a membership system. A year ago I wouldn’t have even known where to begin with something like that.

The thing that made it all click for me was having a simple workflow: write a prompt, build it, push it to GitHub, deploy it live. Once that was in place, I stopped worrying about the technical stuff and just focused on what I was actually trying to build.

Connectors

One last thing — inside Claude’s settings, you can connect other apps you already use.

Once you do, you can talk to those apps through Claude without switching tabs or opening them separately.

Connect Gmail and you can ask Claude to draft a reply to an email, find a specific message, or summarise what’s in your inbox — all without opening Gmail. Connect Notion and you can ask it to pull up a document or search your notes without switching apps.

I have mine connected to a few different tools. It cuts out a lot of the back and forth.

Where to start

If you’re new to all of this, just start with Chat. Ask it something you’d normally Google. Try the “ask me questions” trick on something you’re working on.

Once that feels normal, try Cowork on a folder of files you’ve been meaning to sort through.

Code comes after, when you have an idea for something you actually want to build.

Digital Creator Club

If you want to go deeper on the business and creator side of all this — how to actually use these tools to build things and make money from them — that’s what Digital Creator Club is for.

It’s a private community for creators, founders, and makers. Gated Discord, growth playbooks, mentorship, and a network of people who are actually building things. The kind of honest, practical stuff you don’t really find anywhere else.

Worth checking out if that sounds like your kind of thing.