I use Anthropic's Claude AI tools for very different

What happened

2 trillion valuation on secondary markets as of earlier this month. The company's offerings have been making headline news all year, especially after the US government temporarily banned use of Anthropic's Fable model because it was just too smart and risky for our own good. But cutting past the hype, the excitement, the hyperbole, and the financial insanity, what Anthropic products might you and I care about?

ai is the chatbot, while Claude Code and Claude Cowork are the agentic helpers that carry out tasks on your behalf. The agentic Claude Code and Cowork are more like pickup trucks or panel vans than basic cars. They get work done.

They can even be specially outfitted with skills and plugins, roughly analogous to how your work van might have a ladder mounted on top and be fitted out with tools and specialty gear inside. Put simply, chatbots answer questions while agents do stuff. Now, clearly, that's quite an oversimplification, but it's a good starting point for our discussion.

Back in 2023, when generative AI first hit the scene, all we were doing was feeding prompts and questions into chatbots. The AIs answered questions by searching their considerable knowledge bases. But there were limitations, because their training data had cutoff dates, after which the AIs had no information. Then, a year or so later, the chatbots started to be able to incorporate live web searches into their answers.

That, technically, changed how the AIs "thought" because they were using two information sources: their training data and the whole web (or, at least, the parts of the web where they could gain access).

They started to be able to carry on conversations, keep track of information from previous conversations, know something about you that they retained between sessions, and perform work like programming, but within the limits of giving you chunks of code you could cut and paste into your programs. ai, and Gemini are all chatbots.

Why it matters

ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork? For that matter, what are Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, Fable, and Mythos? In this article, we're going to dig in. ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork, but we'll also put Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, Fable, and Mythos into perspective. Sometimes, I find it easier to understand something if I can relate it to cars. So let's do that with Anthropic's offerings.

When you walk into a car dealer, you typically make two sets of choices. You choose the vehicle model. Do you want a regular sedan? Do you want an SUV? Do you want a pickup truck? They all have their pros and cons, and they all provide advantages for certain types of activities. The second choice is how you equip that SUV or sedan.

The key choice is how big an engine you put in the vehicle. I have a Dodge Challenger RT, a very nice muscle car. The Challenger model ranges from something that makes for a very peppy personal daily driver all the way up to a competitive race car. The difference is mostly in the engine and suspension. 7-liter Hemi V8.

That's powerful -- powerful enough to have a race mode that I've never been brave enough to try. My car even has a racing stripe, which I like to think gives it better aerodynamics (but probably doesn't). 2-liter supercharged High-Output Hemi V8, which turns the Challenger Demon into a street-legal monster that can handle extreme drag-strip duress.

With three times the horsepower and double the torque of my car's Hemi, the engine is a massive performance improvement over what I drive. But here's the thing. I like my car to have some pick-up-and-go. I like it to growl a little bit. But I'm not taking it onto the drag strip or the racetrack. I'm just not. I drive to the hardware store and the coffee drive-through.

I work from home, so I don't commute with it. I can't technically even call it my daily driver because there are days I don't even fire it up. That brings us back to AI. Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, Fable, and Mythos are all LLMs (large language models), roughly equivalent to the different engine sizes. When you use the car analogy, you begin to see why Fable and Mythos were banned.

They're like the racecar engines. They are absurdly powerful and much more expensive. Opus is like my nice 375 hp V8. It's powerful, but not too powerful. And Haiku and Sonnet are like the smaller V6 engines that are available for some of the Dodges. Good, but not great. ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork as different vehicle types, used for different things.

What to watch

The branding gets a little mixed because Gemini is used by Google in its marketing to refer to its AI regardless of where it's running. By contrast, both Anthropic and OpenAI use their chatbot names followed by focus words to specify their agentic tools. So ChatGPT is the chatbot, while ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Codex are the agents.

Likewise, Claude is the chatbot, but Claude Code and Claude Cowork are the agentic tools. Let me give you another analogy. Back in the days when we actually used phones for talking, I had some friends I'd talk to on the phone and have very pleasant conversations with. m. and help rewire my apartment building to provide power to my server rack.