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How to Use Claude's Massive New Upgrades

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  • Remote Control Changes The Mental Model
    • Remote control shifts Claude Code from a terminal tool into something you delegate to and check in on from your phone.
    • It runs locally on your machine, so mobile becomes a window into your file system, MCP servers, tools, and configs. Transcript: Nathaniel Whittemore The clawification of Clawd, maybe we’ll call it the clawdification, kicked off at the end of February with remote control. Remote control was a way to bring Clawd code specifically to your mobile experience. Both the mobile capabilities of OpenClaw, as well as its ability to bridge between different types of devices, were some of the parts of that system that people were most excited about, And so it wasn’t all that surprising to see Claude Code jump on that first. What’s more, even outside of OpenClaw, this is such a natural extension of the product that you’ve got to imagine that this would have happened anyway. The way that remote control works is that you start your task in your Claude Code terminal session, and then you can pick it up and continue working from your phone. Now, there’s nothing happening in the cloud here. Basically, when you’ve started that remote control session on your machine, Cloud is going to continue to run locally that entire time. That gives remote control the ability to use your full environment, including your file system, MCP servers, tools, and product configurations, and you can go back and forth interchangeably. In the docs, they write, unlike Cloud Code on the web, which runs on cloud infrastructure, remote control sessions run directly on your machine and interact with your local file system. The web and mobile interfaces are just a window into that local session. There are three ways to start a remote control session. You can start a dedicated remote control server by navigating to the specific project directory you want to work on and running the Cloud Remote Control command. From there, Cloud will display a session URL that you can use to connect from another device. You can also press your spacebar to get a QR code that you can access from your phone. An interactive session basically means that you have your option of going back between using terminal as you normally would with Cloud Code or using the remote session. So basically the difference with server mode is that on server mode, you’re just using your mobile device to control Cloud Code, whereas interactive, you can go back and forth. Finally, if you are already in a Cloud Code session and you want to move to remote, you can use the slash remote control command or slash RC, and this is going to once again display either A URL or QR code that you can use to connect from another device. First impressions were positive. Prominent solopreneur Peter Levels wrote, He basically compared it favorably to an SSH session, which would be another more technically complex way to log into your local device To control it while on the go. Roman Mirzoyan writes, Yesterday I fixed two bugs and then released an app update to the app store without touching my laptop and having a walk for half a day. Now as time has gone on, people started to realize that this was a bigger shift that they might have originally thought. Gagin Suluja writes, Cloud Code Remote Control just clicked for me. You kick off a task in the terminal, then pick it up from your phone on a walk. That’s not a productivity feature, that’s a relationship shift. You stop thinking of it as a tool you operate and start thinking of it as something you delegate to and check in with. Different mental model entirely. I think that that’s right, and I think that most people are still just slowly coming to that realization because it’s one you kind of have to live, not just hear about. (Time 0:03:03)
  • Dispatch Turns Your Phone Into A Command Chair
    • Dispatch is not just Claude chat on a phone; it acts like an orchestrator for multiple task sessions running on your desktop.
    • One persistent thread keeps context while Claude spins up coding or knowledge-work sessions and returns finished outputs, not every step. Transcript: Nathaniel Whittemore This feature was for Claude Cowork and called Dispatch. Anthropics Felix Reisberg writes, We’re shipping a new feature in Claude Cowork as a research preview that I’m excited about. Dispatch. One persistent conversation with Claude that runs on your computer. Message it from your phone. Come back to finished work. Felix then went on to explain a little bit further. Because it’s Cowork, he writes, Claude runs code in a sandbox on your machine. Your files stay local. You approve what Claude touches before it acts. It feels pretty magical to give Claude a mission on my computer and get occasional updates like creating reports from internal dashboards or finding me a better seat on my next flight. Everything Claude can do on your computer, files, browsers, tools, are reachable from wherever you are. Now one constraint, Felix writes, is that your desktop has to be running. Claude Code PM Noah Zwieben also talked about dispatch. Coolest abilities, he writes, 1. Send files from local machines so you can work on PowerPoints on the go. 2. Spawn sub-sessions on desktop that you can drill down on. 3. Chat about any local co-work session. In the docs, they explain a little bit more about how this works. Anthropic writes, Instead of starting a new session for each task, you have a single persistent thread with Claude. This thread doesn’t reset. Claude retains context from previous tasks so you can pick up where you left off. Message Claude from your phone on the way to work, then follow up from your desktop when you sit down. It’s the same conversation, same context wherever you reach it. When you assign a task, Claude figures out what kind of work is needed and spins up the right session. Development tasks run in Claude code, knowledge work runs in co-work. These In appear in their respective sidebars. You can click into any session for details or wait for the result in the thread. Claude messages you the outcome, a spreadsheet, a memo, a comparison table, a pull request, rather than showing you every step of the process. You’ll get a push notification on your phone when a task is done or when Claude needs your go-ahead. Now, like with remote control, the power users who really started to dig into Dispatch found that it was not just a shift in scale, but a shift in kind. Pavel Hirin writes, Dispatch didn’t fill my dead time. It changed how I structured my day. I went to the jump arena with my kid because I could direct work async from the sidelines. The model isn’t grind during gaps. It’s design your day differently because the work runs without you sitting in front of it. He also wrote an article after 48 hours of experimenting. And one thing that he points out is that Dispatch is not Claude Chat on your phone. Dispatch, he writes, is an orchestrator. From a single conversation on your phone, you spawn and manage multiple co-work task sessions running simultaneously on your desktop. Each session runs independently. Its own context, its own file access, its own connectors. Your phone is the command chair. Your desktop does the heavy lifting. Think of the difference between texting someone a request and sitting in a control room with multiple screens. Each screen is a task session running on your desktop. Your phone directs them all from one conversation thread. So what are the types of tasks he did? During morning coffee at home, Pavel started with, pull the latest competitor updates and summarize changes since last week, as well as draft the sponsor collaboration page using Notion database. While he was walking the dog, he checked task one, the competitor summary. He followed up with, add a comparison table against our current roadmap. The redirect, he points out, took 10 seconds one-handed. While in the passenger seat with his wife driving, he reviewed the new sponsor Notion page. Too formal, he said. Pull the engagement metrics from the last campaign and make the value proposition sharper. He also started task 3, gap analysis on the article draft. While at the jump arena with his kids, he started working on infographic iterations. Move the icons left, change the color of the third section. Finally went back at his desk. Everything was waiting and he reviewed, adjusted, and shipped. Ultimately, he writes the actual direction time across all of these gaps was maybe 25 minutes total. The Claude execution running in parallel was three plus hours of work. Ethan Malek also had a positive experience with Dispatch. (Time 0:05:59)
  • Pavel Hirin Ran Three Hours Of Work From Gaps
    • Pavel Hirin used Dispatch to redesign his day instead of squeezing work into dead time.
    • He directed competitor research, Notion drafting, gap analysis, and infographic edits from coffee, dog walks, the car, and a jump arena. Transcript: Nathaniel Whittemore Pavel Hirin writes, Dispatch didn’t fill my dead time. It changed how I structured my day. I went to the jump arena with my kid because I could direct work async from the sidelines. The model isn’t grind during gaps. It’s design your day differently because the work runs without you sitting in front of it. He also wrote an article after 48 hours of experimenting. And one thing that he points out is that Dispatch is not Claude Chat on your phone. Dispatch, he writes, is an orchestrator. From a single conversation on your phone, you spawn and manage multiple co-work task sessions running simultaneously on your desktop. Each session runs independently. Its own context, its own file access, its own connectors. Your phone is the command chair. Your desktop does the heavy lifting. Think of the difference between texting someone a request and sitting in a control room with multiple screens. Each screen is a task session running on your desktop. Your phone directs them all from one conversation thread. So what are the types of tasks he did? During morning coffee at home, Pavel started with, pull the latest competitor updates and summarize changes since last week, as well as draft the sponsor collaboration page using Notion database. While he was walking the dog, he checked task one, the competitor summary. He followed up with, add a comparison table against our current roadmap. The redirect, he points out, took 10 seconds one-handed. While in the passenger seat with his wife driving, he reviewed the new sponsor Notion page. Too formal, he said. Pull the engagement metrics from the last campaign and make the value proposition sharper. He also started task 3, gap analysis on the article draft. While at the jump arena with his kids, he started working on infographic iterations. Move the icons left, change the color of the third section. Finally went back at his desk. Everything was waiting and he reviewed, adjusted, and shipped. Ultimately, he writes the actual direction time across all of these gaps was maybe 25 minutes total. The Claude execution running in parallel was three plus hours of work. Ethan Malek also had a positive experience with Dispatch. (Time 0:07:50)
  • Channels Make Claude React To The Outside World
    • Channels push outside events into an already-running Claude Code session, letting Claude react without polling or spawning a fresh session.
    • That makes Telegram, Discord, CI failures, webhooks, and monitoring alerts part of one persistent workflow. Transcript: Nathaniel Whittemore Next up, we got Claude Code Channels, which is basically Claude Code’s answer to the open-claw interaction of talking to it via Telegram. Anthropics Tariq writes, We just released Claude Code Channels, which allows you to control your Claude Code session through select MCPs, starting with Telegram and Discord. In the docs, they write, A channel is an MCP server that pushes events into your running Cloud code session, so Cloud can react to things that happen while you’re not at the terminal. Channels can be two-way. Cloud reads the event and replies back through the same channel like a chat bridge. Unlike integrations that spawn a fresh cloud session or wait to be polled, the event arrives in the session you already have open. When Larry Velez asked, how is this better than dispatch, or it’s just an alternative to dispatch? Tariq writes, we want to give you a lot of different options on how you talk to Claude remotely. Channels is more focused on devs who want something hackable. Now just to add a little bit of clarity here, we see Telegram and we just think about ourselves chatting with Cloud Code. But the whole idea of channels is that it’s not just chats from you, yes, that is one type of interaction, but you can also connect other services, like, for example, Sentry Monitoring, Directly to Cloud Code via those channels in Telegram or Discord, so that Cloud can react even while you’re not there. Damian Galarza writes, Instead of Claude pulling data via tool calls, channels push events into the session from the outside. CI failures, webhook payloads, monitoring alerts, chat messages from Telegram or Discord. Anything that can send in post can now reach your running session. And it definitely seems like of these, channels is on the farthest end of the technical spectrum. Dario on Twitter writes, If you missed it, channels are essentially MCP servers that push events into a Claude code session, letting Claude react to the outside world beyond the terminal. This was the exact missing piece I needed for an idea I’ve been brewing. My goal was twofold. Build a custom orchestration system to spawn Claude code sessions anywhere, Docker, VMs, pods, or locally on my MacBook, and then create a custom app across macOS, iOS, and iPadOS To control these agents on the go. Fast forward to today, just four days after channels dropped, is and the iOS app is already up and running. I have so many more ideas on how to tweak and expand this to fit my exact workflow. Now at this point you’d be forgiven for getting a little confused because we’re talking about all these new ways to use CloudCowork and CloudCode remotely, all with slight variations On the theme. This is kind of why you’re going to want to go hack at all of these to understand how they fit your own use cases. But I think one big takeaway is an aggregate, massive shift in how Anthropic is imagining how you’re going to be working with Claude in the future. And effectively, the idea is an always-on, context-maintaining, persistent, interactive orchestration experience work is happening all the time even when you’re not doing it, With the right way to interact with that work from wherever you are and whatever your use case is. (Time 0:13:37)
  • Anthropic Is Building An Always On Execution Layer
    • Anthropic’s updates add up to an always-on orchestration layer, not a set of isolated convenience features.
    • Remote access, channels, and scheduled tasks all assume work keeps running with persistent context while you intervene only when needed. Transcript: Nathaniel Whittemore This is kind of why you’re going to want to go hack at all of these to understand how they fit your own use cases. But I think one big takeaway is an aggregate, massive shift in how Anthropic is imagining how you’re going to be working with Claude in the future. And effectively, the idea is an always-on, context-maintaining, persistent, interactive orchestration experience work is happening all the time even when you’re not doing it, With the right way to interact with that work from wherever you are and whatever your use case is. In addition to those features, we also saw Anthropic go after parity with OpenClaw when it came to scheduling tasks. At the end of February, Cowork got scheduled tasks, think a morning briefing, weekly spreadsheet updates, or Friday team presentations. Then about a week and a half later, we got local scheduled tasks in Cloud Code Desktop. Tariq said that his favorite use case is to ask it to check error logs every few hours and create PRs for any actionable errors. Now, because these tasks are local, they run as long as your computer is awake. But then a couple weeks after that, we got recurring cloud-based tasks. Noah Zwieben again writes, set a repo or repos, a schedule, and a prompt. Claude runs it via cloud infra on your schedule so you don’t need to keep Claude code running on your local machine. He said that so far the Claude code team had found it useful for things like sweeping through open PRs, building features from approved issues, analyzing CI failures overnight, and Syncing docs based on newly merged PRs. And if you’re wondering if this had to do with OpenClaw, in another tweet, Noah said, some might say I built this because I couldn’t figure out how to set up my Mac Mini. And yet, in terms of sheer consumer excitement, all of these were just prelude to what was announced on Monday night. (Time 0:15:51)
  • Computer Use Extends Claude Beyond APIs
    • Computer use gives Claude the fallback ability to operate any app through mouse, keyboard, and screen when no connector exists.
    • Nathaniel Whittemore argues this matters for real enterprise work because agents must traverse old custom software, browsers, IDEs, and spreadsheets. Transcript: Nathaniel Whittemore The official Claude account on Twitter writes, you can now enable Claude to use your computer to complete tasks. It opens your app, navigates your browser, fills in spreadsheets, anything you do sitting at your desk. About 16 hours after that tweet went live, 40 million people have viewed it. 62,000 people have bookmarked it, and the chatter is overwhelming. Anthropics Felix Riesberg writes, Today we’re releasing a feature that allows Claude to control your computer, mouse, keyboard, and screen, giving it the ability to use any app. Now he also points out that these features shouldn’t be viewed in isolation. Felix writes, I believe this is especially useful if used with Dispatch, which allows you to remotely control Claude on your computer while you’re away. In their announcement blog, Anthropic writes, When Claude doesn’t have access to the tools it needs, it will point, click, and navigate what’s on your screen to perform the task itself. It can open files, use the browser, and run dev tools automatically with no setup required. When using your computer, they say, Claude will reach for the most precise tool first, starting with existing connectors to services like Slack or Google Calendar. However, when Claude finds that there is not a connector set up, it can control browser, mouse, keyboard, and screen to complete different tasks. Now, as you might be thinking right now, this kind of supercharges those features like Dispatch. Anthropic agrees, writing, a Claude co-worker Claude code session for a report or a pull request. Claude’s new computer use capability makes dispatch even more helpful. Now Claude can use your computer on your behalf while you’re away. For example, to create a morning briefing while you’re on the train, make changes in your IDE, run tests, and put up a PR or keep your 3D printing project moving according to your initial Plan. A lot of the initial response was fairly breathless. Sui Bertabo writes, is absolutely insane. The LLM era is over. Goggin, again, who we heard from earlier, writes, been testing it in co-work mode. The thing that gets me isn’t the automation. It’s that it figures out what you actually meant when you said handle this for me. That’s the shift. Bilal writes, Claude is no longer just a tool that uses the computer, it operates inside it as a true execution layer. It can replicate everything a human does. Mouse movements, keyboard inputs, screen interaction. It can open any application, navigate through it, and produce the exact output you want. This goes beyond APIs. This is full real-world system control, which means from anywhere, you can control your devices and automate workflows end-to In terms of examples, a lot of people started fairly Simply. Gavin Purcell writes, Okay, this is pretty cool. Just had it grab a photo off my desktop from afar. Dumb and simple, yes, but done in natural language with no weird setup. Daniel San writes, I don’t like posting about anything I haven’t tried myself, so I saw the announcement that Claude Dispatch now controls your computer, and I simply asked it to open Twitter and like a Claude post. Done. This is getting more interesting and more dangerous by the minute. Adit Sheth writes, This is the first time a mainstream AI product actually behaves like a junior ops hire that lives on your laptop. And Peter Gostev points out that this could be especially valuable for corporate stuck-in software that isn’t going to port into AI ecosystems natively. He writes, this is another domino to fall, computer use of arbitrary apps, not just your browser. This is a big deal for a lot of corporates who have custom crappy apps from 20 or 30 years ago. And summing it all up, Box’s Aaron Levy argues that this is, to put it simply, a big deal. In a long post on Twitter, he writes, Computer use and the ability to write and run code on the fly are the ultimate primitives for agents to be able to take on more and more tasks and knowledge Work. Most work requires hopping between multiple applications and working with broad sets of data in a workflow, and agents will need to be able to traverse these systems to be able to effectively Automate any real work in the enterprise. Now we will have agents that are the equivalent of having an expert programmer or any number of them that can write code or use any API to automate writes, whatever work you’re doing. Agents will have access to either a user’s computer and resources or their own sandbox to operate in and be able to pull together the tools necessary to perform the task at hand. This opens up the broadest set of agentic use cases. To be sure, there are going to be various hurdles around security, permissions and access control, identity challenges, and more. For instance, should the agent always act on behalf of the user, or should they have their own identity and limited set of access rights? How do you triage security events when historically volume of activity on a system is no longer a reliable signal of a security issue? How do you ensure the agent isn’t going rogue or getting prompt injected to do something risky? All problems that need to get figured out. Then there’s also lots of work needed to ensure software is set up to enable agents to operate with their tools in a headless fashion. This will be an uncomfortable reality for some incumbents, and equally a welcome one for tools that historically have operated seamlessly via APIs and have business models to support This. Lots of change coming in the world of work agents, and it’s going to get pretty wild. (Time 0:17:28)
  • Users Started Computer Use With Simple Proofs
    • Early users tested computer use with tiny tasks to verify the magic before attempting bigger workflows.
    • Gavin Purcell had Claude grab a desktop photo remotely, while Daniel San asked it to open Twitter and like a Claude post. Transcript: Nathaniel Whittemore Gavin Purcell writes, Okay, this is pretty cool. Just had it grab a photo off my desktop from afar. Dumb and simple, yes, but done in natural language with no weird setup. Daniel San writes, I don’t like posting about anything I haven’t tried myself, so I saw the announcement that Claude Dispatch now controls your computer, and I simply asked it to open Twitter and like a Claude post. Done. This is getting more interesting and more dangerous by the minute. Adit Sheth writes, This is the first time a mainstream AI product actually behaves like a junior ops hire that lives on your laptop. And Peter Gostev points out that this could be especially valuable for corporate stuck-in software that isn’t going to port into AI ecosystems natively. He writes, this is another domino to fall, computer use of arbitrary apps, not just your browser. This is a big deal for a lot of corporates who have custom crappy apps from 20 or 30 years ago. And summing it all up, Box’s Aaron Levy argues that this is, to put it simply, a big deal. (Time 0:20:16)
  • Small Teams Gain New Leverage From Claude
    • Nathaniel Whittemore says these upgrades imply much higher leverage for very small AI-powered teams.
    • He links computer use, code-writing agents, code review teams, project support, and 1 million token context to a different software development process. Transcript: Nathaniel Whittemore In a long post on Twitter, he writes, Computer use and the ability to write and run code on the fly are the ultimate primitives for agents to be able to take on more and more tasks and knowledge Work. Most work requires hopping between multiple applications and working with broad sets of data in a workflow, and agents will need to be able to traverse these systems to be able to effectively Automate any real work in the enterprise. Now we will have agents that are the equivalent of having an expert programmer or any number of them that can write code or use any API to automate writes, whatever work you’re doing. Agents will have access to either a user’s computer and resources or their own sandbox to operate in and be able to pull together the tools necessary to perform the task at hand. This opens up the broadest set of agentic use cases. To be sure, there are going to be various hurdles around security, permissions and access control, identity challenges, and more. For instance, should the agent always act on behalf of the user, or should they have their own identity and limited set of access rights? How do you triage security events when historically volume of activity on a system is no longer a reliable signal of a security issue? How do you ensure the agent isn’t going rogue or getting prompt injected to do something risky? All problems that need to get figured out. Then there’s also lots of work needed to ensure software is set up to enable agents to operate with their tools in a headless fashion. This will be an uncomfortable reality for some incumbents, and equally a welcome one for tools that historically have operated seamlessly via APIs and have business models to support This. Lots of change coming in the world of work agents, and it’s going to get pretty wild. Now we’re already going pretty long, but I want to point out that this is not the end of what has been pushed over the last month. Running quickly through some of the second tier and quality of life type of announcements, one big complaint that lots of folks have had about co-work is that there wasn’t a conception Of a project. Now there is, which will make a huge difference for day-to functionality. Also in March, the Claude Code team launched Code Review, where, as they put it, Claude dispatches a team of agents to hunt for bugs. This past month, the 1 million token context window actually became available generally for both Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet. Y Combinators Kerry Tan wrote, I underestimated how powerful Opus 4.6 with 1 million tokens is. Even last year, we were absolutely hitting context limit problems constantly 1 million tokens mean you can do much more complex analysis entirely in context. Cloud Code is so much better. Meanwhile, over in the main Cloud app, Cloud can now build interactive charts and diagrams. And we also got upgrades for Cloud for Excel and Cloud for PowerPoint, including the ability to integrate them together. They write, When you’ve got more than one file open, Cloud shares the full context of your conversation between them. Pull data from spreadsheets, build out tables, and update a deck without re-explaining a step. Skills are also now available inside the Excel and PowerPoint add-ins, meaning that when your team has some standard workflow, like running a variance analysis or building a client Deck, you can save that as a skill. Other people in your organization can then run it in one click from their own sidebar. (Time 0:21:09)