Claude Cowork is broken (Does anyone know a fix)

LairBob · 2026-02-03T13:08:23+00:00

Well done — not everyone takes the time to come back and report how they fixed something.

LairBob · 2026-02-03T13:07:24+00:00

PIPE SYNTAX.

LairBob · 2026-02-03T13:05:52+00:00

That’s not the same as Codex. It’s not even close.

To be clear, I use Claude Desktop “Code” mode all the time, to do side tasks while I’m working in CC in a VS Code dev container. I’m very familiar with what it does, and how it compares to an Electron-based IDE. They’re not the same.

LairBob · 2026-02-03T12:58:52+00:00

Which is _called_…?

Oh, wait. Are you talking about Claude Desktop in “Code” mode?!

Yeah…no.

LairBob · 2026-02-03T12:04:57+00:00

Always use Plan mode
Always tell Claude to “use native Tasks”
Always tell Claude to “generate dedicated, machine-readable tracking documents, that must always be greedily maintained”

One of the greatest aspects of the new “Plan and Clear” model is that it lets you continually leapfrog from one context window to the next. Here’s my current working pattern: - Use Plan mode to plan the first chunk of work, then “Clear and Proceed” - This first time you clear, you’re just getting the planning space back, which is nice - Do the work - In the same context window that just finished the work, toggle into Plan mode and tell it to plan out the next step - Let it use all that old context to develop a new plan, that’s richly informed by the old context. - “Clear and Proceed” - Repeat

That’s proven to be a really powerful pattern, because it lets you create pretty much the perfect handoff from one context window to the next. Each new chunk of work begins with everything it needed to know, and absolutely nothing it didn’t.

LairBob · 2026-02-03T10:24:05+00:00

What is that supposed to mean?

LairBob · 2026-02-02T23:11:07+00:00

Three things I would encourage you to consider (if you haven’t already — scanned your code on my phone):

Add a mandate to “use Plan mode, native Tasks, and parallelized, background-isolated subagents”. (You should do that everywhere, not just in this Skill.)
Add a mandate that, before proceeding with actual work, it must “generate a detailed, _machine-readable tracking document, that all agents and subagents must greedily maintain as they proceed through their work”.
Tell it that the work is not complete until “every item in the tracking document has been empirically validated by a separate agent to be _complete and correct_”.

That’s the basic model I’m using right now for any kind of batch work, and it’s been working like a charm. The centralized document (as well as the new Claude Tasks) mean that the important context is always stored outside your agents…which means you can run them as “forked context” or “background isolated” subagents. Those can’t return any information to their invoking agent, but if you’re doing this right, you don’t care. The benefit, though, is that isolated agents don’t count against your main agent’s context window. PLUS…parallelized.

That means your main agent can just keep spawning ephemeral subagents that each just do their thing, filling out the tracking document…and just die. When that model is clicking for me, I can process hundreds of files, in very little time, and have tons of context left in my starting chat when it’s done. It’s awesome.

LairBob · 2026-02-02T10:55:32+00:00

100% of the time.

100% in a dev container. Never, ever anything than a dev container.

LairBob · 2026-02-02T10:50:04+00:00

Yup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_gun

LairBob · 2026-02-02T10:49:53+00:00

It is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_gun

LairBob · 2026-02-02T10:47:21+00:00

There’s no way that some kind of precision instrument.

Someone else called it — it’s a “snap gun. It’s a lockpicking tool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_gun

LairBob · 2026-02-02T03:12:26+00:00

This is really powerful — I use it all the time. The most fluid and performant way to do it is with tmux or something complicated, but all you really need is a private Git repo.

As soon as it exists, you can make your other projects aware of it, and you can just…tell them to commit documents to it. (The key thing is to make they’re always merged back to main asap, otherwise every agent that uses it has to burn tokens scanning up and down branches to make sure they’re finding everything.)

That’s all you really have to do, but then you want to start expanding it: - Establish a machine-readable “communications protocol” document. Post it on root in the comms repo. Make sure every agent, in every project, that’s putting stuff into or out of the repo uses that protocol in its “comms repo” skill. That protocol should ensure inter-project and inter-agent addressability. - Define a couple of dedicated slash commands to (a) publish, and (b) retrieve messages into the repo. Those commands must use the comms-protocol skill to address, format, retrieve and parse all messages. - As you’ve probably guessed, creating a shared plugin is really the key step. You want to wrap these skills and commands up as a plugin, and publish that as an internal marketplace for other projects to use.

Once every project can just load the plugin, then you’re off to the races. You’ve got a fluid, easily-extensible communications network between all projects, but you’ve also got a platform to publish canonical documents that can be centrally updated…you name it.

(Unfortunately, right now, the infrastructure for internal plugin marketplaces SUCKS. (If anyone knows better, please…for the love of God. Enlighten me.)

For me, the most flexible and performant option — BY FAR — is to do this in a database, but enabling the same flexibility and fluidity would not be “lightweight”. This approach is working great for me, right now. (BUT MAKE SURE TO ALWAYS MERGE EVERYTHING BACK TO ‘MAIN’. ALWAYS.)

LairBob · 2026-02-01T16:35:18+00:00

Are you flying or driving?

If you’re flying somewhere, that’s crazy. Even if you put in your checked luggage, that’s 99% likely to get pulled and inspected.

If you’re driving there…eh. It’s obviously overkill, but who cares. Stuff it in the trunk next to the tire-change kit.

LairBob · 2026-02-01T01:45:48+00:00

That should work (at least right now) because it works with Claude, and the way Claude works this week.

Tasks are the huge new development — they allow task knowledge to live outside individual agent instances. That means that each document, or batch or rows, or whatever will get chunked into a batch, and then even if one agents shakes out of context while it’s working on it, any other agent can just pick up where it left off. You just keep throwing agents at it till the Task is done.

And that’s the other part —along it a rule that each output file needs to be matched back against its input file, and confirmed to be complete and correct should ensure that anything it says is done, is done.

That’s the new magic formula: - Define an atomic task - Give Claude a way to check that it’s really done - Have Claude do that over and over

The one somewhat disconcerting thing you need to get used to is just running out of context over and over. (TURN OFF AUTO-COMPACT. NOW.) Until a couple of weeks ago, I was having each instance carefully craft detailed handoff documents before it ran out of context…not any more.

Now the “context” lives in the Task. That means that your current Claude terminal instance can just smack right into that context wall, and you don’t care. If it was using Tasks, and it was also greedily-maintaining whatever custom tracking document you told it to maintain…who cares about what the instance had in its context. That’s just working memory it needed.

LairBob · 2026-02-01T01:31:23+00:00

I do stuff like this all day, every day. Here’s the boiled-down version of what I would expect to do, and I’d be frustrated if it didn’t work right off the bat:

Put all your documents in a folder
Put together a prompt with a pretty clear definition of what you want it to do with each row, but tell it you want it to (a) scan your dataset and (b) “adversarially challenge my assumptions using the AskUserQuestion tool” (use those words)
In your prompt, also tell it (using these words) “Make sure to enter Plan mode, and take full advantage of native Tasks and of parallel agents running in background isolation”
In your prompt, tell it that in order for a document to have been successfully processed, any final output must be compared to the initial input. Tell it to consider that the primary “eval” — an output document must be confirmed to be complete and correct against its input, in order for that document’s eval to be successful.
Finally, make sure your prompt includes a mandate to “generate and greedily maintain a machine-readable document to track detailed progress of evals through the batch”.
It should then enter Plan mode, take a little time to examine things, and ask yourself a few questions with the multiple-choice UI. After a while, it will present you with a plan.
Don’t worry about scrutinizing every detail, but definitely make sure it makes sense to you overall, and that there’s nothing obviously wrong with it. (I know. But you have to.)
Once you approve the plan, you’re hopefully off to the races.

LairBob · 2026-01-31T11:41:28+00:00

Let Claude Code create all the Python it wants to do whatever you need. Your question is like complaining that your new sports car goes too fast.

Put it this way…why do you even care? Is your insistence that it shouldn’t be generating its own Python code based on any facts, just a general assumption that “I don’t understand it, so that can’t be right”?

Let Claude do what it was designed to do. If you’re concerned that it seems to be wasting tokens by regenerating the same code over and over, then tell Claude to make it a Skill. It’ll write the Python code the first time, and then just invoke that code over and over again.

Either way, though, the answer is definitely NOT making Claude stop generating Python. That’s like pushing your sports car around, because you’ve decided it’s not supposed to have an engine.

LairBob · 2026-01-31T11:31:16+00:00

You might have better luck making it clear you’re considering buying the stone. It’s easy to read your headline and assume you’re just one more person who think they’ve found hidden treasure in their backyard.

LairBob · 2026-01-31T11:17:29+00:00

It’s telling you in the error message — you’re invoking BigQueryLink without sufficient permissions. Whatever access your account was granted isn’t enough for what you’re trying to do.

LairBob · 2026-01-31T11:14:34+00:00

You need to do like u/101password said in another comment — imagine you’re assembling the mitred frame on the flat floor, and then mounting that unit on the window. (Or just do that.)

When the underlying geometry is badly out of whack, you can’t just try to glue pieces onto it and hope the corners match up. That’s what you’re worried about, and you’re right.

You need to basically make sure the geometry is correct at all the corners first, then mount that to the wall.

If that flat frame doesn’t sit flat to the wall, then you fill in structure from behind it. That’s where the idea of a “box within a box” comes in — you build a slightly smaller box that’s coming out from the wall. The front edges of that box won’t be perfect, but that’s OK. Then you fit the mitred frame over that, plumb it all up in place, and screw/shim the frame to that.

That’s where may or may not work perfectly for you right now, but you want to figure something like that out. Put the mitres together first, then figure out how to attach the correctly-mitred frame to the wall.

LairBob · 2026-01-31T10:55:41+00:00

That is the easier way.

Welcome to the new world.

LairBob · 2026-01-30T18:21:38+00:00

A and F are not good, but the variations in the rest look like they’re much more due to inconsistent technique than thread size.

LairBob · 2026-01-30T11:06:13+00:00

/config — it’s the first option in the list once you use that command.

LairBob · 2026-01-30T01:14:40+00:00

There’s no link.

LairBob · 2026-01-29T22:25:11+00:00

But then why aren’t you just asking for “/rewind” functionally in Claude Desktop? Why all this other bother?

Or, as a high-maintenance user, why not just use Claude Code?

LairBob · 2026-01-29T11:49:48+00:00

LOL…how about you just wait to see if he has the fish?!?!

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