The four Claude surfaces
I don't work with one Claude. I work with four, and each has a seat it's good at.
Claude Chat is the director. It reasons about the whole system, writes the specs, generates the prompts that downstream tools run, and keeps the studio's state straight. It talks to canon and thinks out loud. It doesn't touch files or deploy anything, which keeps the thinking surface clean.
Claude Code is the terminal hand. It lives in the repo, writes and tests the scripts, owns the deploys, and runs the multi-step coding loops that would eat a person's afternoon. When something has to ship to a live site, Code ships it.
Claude Cowork sits on my desktop and works the local files. It reads and writes the project folder, runs scripts through the Mac terminal, and handles jobs that need to touch hundreds of rows or hundreds of files at once. Cowork and Code are peers, not backups for each other. Each earns its own seam.
Claude Design generates the UI and layout. It composes pages from a design token file and a set of layout modes, so what it makes already looks like the studio instead of a generic template.
Work moves between them by routing, not by accident. A spec written in Chat carries a field that names which surface runs it. Chat writes, Code or Cowork executes, Design composes, and canon records what happened so the chain holds across sessions. The trick isn't any single surface being clever. It's that the four of them stay in their lanes, and the handoffs are written down.