Go With The Flow: Cowork Deep Dive - Skills, Guardrails, and Avoiding Disaster

Danny and Ritu dive deep into Anthropic's new Cowork feature in Claude Desktop - the good, the bad, and the ugly. Ritu shares a cautionary tale about file deletion gone wrong, while Danny demonstrates his custom skills pack that protects users from common pitfalls. What You'll Learn: What Cowork is and how it differs from Claude Code and Claude Desktop Why the rm -rf command can permanently delete your files (and how to prevent it) How to set up deny lists in your Claude settings to protect critical files The power of skills and bootstrap files for consistent, reliable outputs Decision panels: letting Claude guide you through complex choices Cascade skills: research to article to slides in one automated flow Key Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction to Cowork 02:13 - Ritu's file deletion disaster story 08:37 - Understanding rm vs rm -rf commands 10:01 - Setting up deny lists for protection 16:00 - Evolution from Claude Desktop to Claude Code to Cowork 25:55 - Skills deep dive: orchestrator, quality gate, flow state 39:48 - Research cascade skill demonstration 43:18 - Decision panels walkthrough 48:58 - 2026 predictions: Ambient AI and pixel-free interfaces Resources Mentioned: Danny's Skills Pack (available to listeners) Typora - Markdown editor ($14 lifetime) Time Machine backup for Mac users Git for version control Connect with Ritu Java: LinkedIn Connect with Danny McMillan: LinkedIn | Seller Sessions