Cowork
An assistant that works on the files in a folder you share with it, on your own device: sorting, writing, filling in spreadsheets, on a schedule if you want
Cowork is an assistant for your files. You share a folder with it, describe what needs to happen, and it works there: reading documents, sorting them, writing summaries, filling in a spreadsheet, building a presentation.
Everything happens on your device. The folder never leaves it as a whole, only what the assistant actually reads goes to the model.
What it can do
| Area | Examples |
|---|---|
| Find things | Search the contents of every file in the folder, find files by name pattern, look up metadata |
| Read | Text, Markdown, CSV, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, and inside ZIP, TAR and TAR.GZ archives |
| Scanned PDFs | A PDF with no embedded text is put through text recognition automatically, and the result says so |
| Calculate | Sums, counts, averages, minimum, maximum and median over a spreadsheet, grouped and filtered, computed on your machine instead of guessed from text |
| Look at things | An image is passed to the model as an actual image. A PDF page or a slide can be rendered so the assistant sees the layout it produced |
| Write | Create and edit real Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents, plus plain text, Markdown and CSV |
| Tidy up | Move, copy, rename, create folders, delete |
| Remind you | Create, list and cancel reminders |
Things people actually use it for
- "Sort the invoices in this folder into subfolders by year and supplier, and list anything you could not classify."
- "Read all twelve interview transcripts and write me a summary per interview plus one across all of them."
- "Fill column F of the price list with the margin, and tell me which rows have no purchase price."
- "How much did we spend per cost centre last quarter according to this spreadsheet?"
- "Turn this Word document into a presentation in our corporate template."
- "Rename all these photos to the date they were taken."
Cowork and Code share the same engine and the same approval model. Cowork is the one for documents and filing work, Code is the one for a software project and adds a terminal, Git and a preview. Their shared folders are kept strictly separate: a folder you shared with Cowork is not reachable from Code, and the other way round.
Sharing a folder
The assistant works exclusively in folders you share. Without a folder there is nothing to do, and Cowork says so rather than guessing.
Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+C).Add more folders if the job spans several. A conversation may hold more than one, and the first one is the primary folder the conversation is grouped under.
Every file access is checked against those folders. A path outside them is rejected by the app itself, whatever the model asks for. You can widen that under Data storage, and it is off by default for good reason.
Adding a folder later
Before the first message, the workspace picker in the middle of the window does it. During a running conversation, the Files tab has an Add folder row at the top. Use that when it turns out the job needs a second folder, for example a template folder next to the folder being filed.
Switching folders does not unshare anything. Every folder you have worked in stays shared, so a run in one conversation keeps going while you read another. Remove is the only way back out, and it revokes that folder's permissions along with it.
Permission modes
The mode decides how much the assistant may do without asking. It sits in the composer and can be switched at any time, also with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+M.
| Mode | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Plan | Reads only. Produces a plan, changes nothing |
| Normal | Asks before every change and every deletion |
| Allow changes | File changes run without asking. External tools still ask |
| Auto | Everything runs without asking |
Before Allow changes or Auto takes effect, the app spells out what that means and asks you to confirm. Plan and Normal switch immediately.
What Auto really means
Auto is not "the assistant is more capable now". It is the same assistant with the questions turned off:
- Files are written, overwritten, moved and deleted without a separate confirmation.
- It still cannot leave the shared folders. That boundary is enforced by the app, not by the mode.
- It still cannot do anything Cowork has no tool for. There is no shell here, so there is no way for it to run a command.
- Actions of connected services keep their own gate unless you also switched those to automatic.
Use it in folders where an unwanted change would not hurt, for example a working copy or an export folder. For your only copy of something, Allow changes gives you almost the same flow while a deletion still stops and asks.
Approvals
When the assistant wants to change something, an approval card appears showing what would actually happen: a diff for a text file, the affected cells for a spreadsheet, the size of a deletion.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Cmd/Ctrl+Enter | Approve |
Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Enter | Approve everything pending |
Esc | Decline |
Each card can also grant a narrower standing permission. Always allow binds to one kind of action in one shared folder, which is why the button names the folder. Removing that folder revokes those permissions with it.
Permission to delete is deliberately never remembered beyond the current conversation.
Actions of connected services, so integrations and MCP servers, have their own gate on the server side. They can be approved automatically with Auto-approve connections, independently of the file gate. Integrations covers what those actions are.
Talking to a running assistant
You do not have to wait for a turn to finish.
- Send while it works. Your message goes into the running turn at the next step boundary, so it steers the work in progress instead of arriving after it. The exception is a pending approval or a slash command, which wait for the current step.
- Several messages typed in a row are queued and shown as such, then dispatched in order.
- Stop ends the turn. Everything already done stays done, the assistant does not roll back.
- If a turn hits its step budget with work left, it no longer just stops: a card asks whether it should keep going, and continuing resumes the same turn with every step so far intact.
The task list
For a job with several steps, the assistant keeps a visible list above the composer, one entry per step with its state. You can switch it off under Chat settings, and with it off the assistant works without a list rather than writing a stand-in into the conversation.
Standing instructions per folder
Some things you would otherwise repeat in every conversation: how invoices are named here, which folder is off limits, that summaries should be in English. Enter them once through the pencil icon in the header, or through the workspace picker menu, and they apply to every conversation in that folder.
/anweisungen has the assistant look at the folder and propose a first version for you.
Instructions belong to the folder, not to your account, so a colleague working in the same shared drive folder is not affected.
History and folders
The Cowork history is grouped by project folder. Each group can be collapsed, has a + for a new conversation in that folder, and a remove action.
Opening a conversation switches the workspace to that conversation's folders. If a folder has been renamed, moved or unshared, the conversation still opens read only and offers to pick a folder again, which rewrites the assignment. The history is never lost with the folder.
Undoing a change
The Files panel keeps saved earlier versions of every file the assistant changed, plus a bin for what it deleted. You can restore a single entry, or roll back everything one request changed with "restore the state before this request".
That history covers earlier conversations too, since it belongs to the folder rather than to the chat.