The Complete Beginner's Guide to Claude: Understanding Projects, Cowork, and Code

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The Complete Beginner's Guide to Claude: Understanding Projects, Cowork, and Code

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A comprehensive breakdown of Claude's four core modules: Projects for reusable custom context, Cowork for desktop automation and scheduled tasks, Code for app building, and Connectors & Skills for workflow integration—plus model selection tips and ChatGPT migration methods.

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Claude is evolving from a simple conversational AI tool into a full-stack productivity platform spanning writing, coding, and design automation. According to a beginner's tutorial from a Bilibili creator, mastering its core functional modules takes less than 15 minutes—yet most people never move beyond basic conversation, missing out on the real potential of the three major modules: Projects, Cowork, and Code.

What Is Claude: Three Access Methods and Model Selection

Claude is an AI chatbot developed by Anthropic, accessible via the web, iOS/Android mobile apps, and a macOS desktop client. Like ChatGPT, you can converse with it, ask questions, and get responses—but Claude's capabilities go far beyond that.

Claude currently offers three tiers of models. The most powerful is Claude Opus (latest version 4.7), excelling at complex logical reasoning and deep programming tasks, but it's also the most resource-intensive model.

Claude Sonnet is suited for general writing scenarios—drafting video scripts, creating PDF documents, helping with homework, and more. Claude Haiku targets lightweight tasks with faster response times. Understanding the differences between these three models is the first step to using Claude efficiently.

Claude Projects: Configure Once, Reuse Continuously

Projects is one of Claude's most practical features. Its core value lies in letting users complete repetitive context configuration once, eliminating the need to repeatedly provide background information afterward.

The tutorial author's approach is quite representative: he imported all the scripts he had written over the past six months into a single Project, allowing Claude to learn his writing style, expression habits, and linguistic characteristics. Subsequently, Claude could produce content matching his personal style in bulk without requiring repeated context input. This feature is similar to ChatGPT's Custom GPT, but integrated into Claude's conversational environment, making it more accessible.

For any user who needs to repeatedly explain the same background to AI, Projects is a feature that should be configured first.

Custom GPT vs. Projects: ChatGPT's Custom GPT allows users to preset system instructions, upload knowledge base files, and publish configured GPTs for others to use—essentially a shareable standalone application. Claude's Projects, by contrast, is more like a private workspace: each Project has its own independent conversation history and uploaded documents, where users can engage in ongoing multi-turn conversations, and Claude maintains memory of background materials and writing styles across all sessions within that project. Both share the same core idea (fixing repetitive context in place), but Projects doesn't involve a publishing mechanism and focuses more on long-term knowledge management for individuals and small teams.

Claude Cowork: Your Desktop AI Execution Assistant

Cowork is available only in the Claude desktop app and requires a paid subscription. Its positioning is that of "an AI assistant that can operate your computer"—reorganizing files, reviewing folders and extracting data to generate PDFs, editing images, and interacting with browsers through Claude in Chrome.

Cowork also includes several easily overlooked capabilities:

Scheduled Tasks allow users to set daily repetitive operations to run automatically. For example, the tutorial demonstrates this case: every morning at 10 AM, Cowork automatically uses Claude in Chrome to access a Twitter account, scrape the most viral AI tweets, rewrite them into video scripts matching the user's personal style, and save them as PDF files to the desktop.

ClaudeDispatch addresses remote control needs: when you're away from your computer, you can send instructions to Dispatch via the Claude app on your phone, and it will pass the task to Cowork on your desktop for execution—such as sending a file from the desktop or sending an email with a signature image.

Claude Code: A Complete Pipeline from Design to Application

The Code module targets development and prototyping scenarios, supporting three access methods: desktop app, VS Code extension, and command-line interface (CLI). Users can instruct Claude through natural language to build complete websites, applications, or real-time dashboards.

The tutorial author calls this the best practice of "vibe coding"—building products incrementally through conversation rather than planning every detail in advance.

Claude's recently launched Design feature further extends this pipeline. Users can upload reference materials, and Claude will create file structures and automatically execute design tasks, outputting in HTML format. The most practical aspect is the export capability: designs can be exported directly to Canva for further editing, or exported to Claude Code to enter the development phase directly. This means the transition from design to coding no longer requires manual conversion.

What Is "Vibe Coding": The concept was introduced by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, referring to developers no longer writing code line by line, but instead describing intent in natural language, letting AI generate and iterate on the implementation, with developers only judging whether the results meet expectations. This mode lowers the barrier to programming, enabling non-professional developers to build usable websites, apps, or dashboards with Claude Code. However, it's worth noting that vibe coding is better suited for prototype validation and internal tools—if used in production environments, human review of generated code for security, performance, and maintainability is still required.

Skills and Connectors: Integrating Claude into Your Workflow

Connectors are the entry point for Claude's integration with external applications. After connecting Claude to Gmail, the tutorial author can get a summary of unread emails every morning, determine which need immediate attention and which can be ignored, and even have Claude reply on their behalf. Through connectors, users can also directly call Gamma within Claude to create presentations, use HeyGen to generate AI digital human videos, and create AI videos through Hicksfield.

Skills are a mechanism for encapsulating instructions. Each Skill is essentially a .md file that defines the execution steps, inputs, and outputs of a task. Users simply type a slash followed by the skill name to trigger the entire process. Multiple related Skills can be combined into a Plugin—for example, a marketing plugin might include content creation, image generation, infographic creation, and other skills.

The most critical one is the "Skill Creator"—a meta-skill used to generate all other skills. Users just describe their needs, and Claude automatically generates a high-quality .md file. Additionally, users can import skill files shared by others and use them directly in their own Claude.

Connectors and the MCP Protocol: The underlying technology behind Connectors is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic in late 2024. This is an open standard for governing how AI models communicate with external data sources and tools. Developers only need to implement a server according to MCP, and Claude can then use it to read and write databases, call third-party APIs, and operate local files—without needing custom integrations for each one. Connectors like Gmail, Gamma, and HeyGen are essentially MCP-compliant wrappers. MCP has been adopted by multiple AI vendors, meaning connectors written for Claude may also be reusable by other platforms in the future, reducing the risk of ecosystem fragmentation.

Claude in Chrome and Data Migration

The Claude in Chrome extension provides browser-level automation capabilities. Its "Teach Claude" feature allows Claude to observe and learn user workflows—for example, the complete process from receiving a bill email, extracting information, to entering it into invoicing software and generating an invoice. Once learning is complete, Claude can execute the same sequence of steps on the user's behalf.

For users considering migrating from ChatGPT, Claude offers a convenient path: get a specific prompt from the Claude website, paste it into ChatGPT, and it will export the user profile information accumulated by ChatGPT, which can then be imported into Claude's account settings. After migration, Claude possesses the same level of user understanding as ChatGPT.

Additionally, the Claude Developer Platform targets developers who need to build applications, offering API access (at additional cost). It's worth noting that Claude's usage limits deplete quickly, and Design features and regular conversations are calculated separately—users should regularly check the Billing page in Settings to monitor remaining quota.

Claude's feature matrix has already far exceeded the scope of a "chatbot." Projects solves context reuse, Cowork solves desktop automation, Code solves application building, and Connectors and Skills solve workflow integration—the combination of these four dimensions is the complete picture of Claude as a productivity platform.

Usage Quotas and Billing Mechanisms: Claude allocates different usage quotas based on subscription tier (Free, Pro, Max), and consumption varies significantly across models—Opus depletes fastest, Haiku slowest. Within a single conversation, long context, large file uploads, and complex reasoning all accelerate quota consumption. Moreover, standalone features like Claude Code and Design often have separate usage pools calculated independently from regular conversations, so users need to check remaining quotas for each module separately on the Billing page in Settings. If quotas are exhausted, users can choose to wait for a reset or upgrade their subscription; team and enterprise users can also pay per API usage through the Developer Platform, bypassing subscription quota limits.

One-line Summary

Mastering Claude's Projects, Cowork, Code, and Connectors modules is essential to unlocking its full-stack productivity potential.

Paragraph Summary

This article systematically outlines Claude's evolution from chatbot to full-stack productivity platform. It first introduces three access methods and the positioning differences between the Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku models; then delves into four core modules—Projects learns user style by importing historical content, enabling one-time context configuration for long-term reuse; Cowork provides desktop-level automation with scheduled tasks and mobile remote scheduling; Code combines natural language instructions with Design features to connect design and development; Connectors and Skills embed Claude into daily workflows through external integration and skill encapsulation. The article also covers the Chrome extension's workflow learning capability and methods for migrating user profiles from ChatGPT, and reminds users to pay attention to usage billing mechanisms. The core conclusion: only by combining these four dimensions can you realize Claude's full value as a productivity platform.