The part I care about isn’t Docs or Slides. It’s that the mode picker is gone. Anthropic says users used both Chat and Cowork but hated deciding up front — and couldn’t move started work from one into the other. I’ve lost sessions to exactly that, realizing three prompts in that I needed file access.
Now Claude decides for itself what a task needs and pulls in context, skills and connectors. That’s a routing bet, and heise is right that nobody can judge it before rollout. My plan: keep the real work in the CLI, where I control the tools, and let the merged UI have the throwaway stuff.
The story — Anthropic is merging Claude Chat, Cowork and Artifacts into a single interface: instead of choosing a session type, you start one and Claude picks what the task requires. It also announced Claude Docs (co-written documents, exporting to Google Docs and Word) and Claude Slides (editable, presentable decks, still downloadable as PowerPoint or PDF), plus Claude Design inside normal conversations. Rollout starts with Pro and Max over the coming weeks; the new tools are paid-tier beta. (Source)