I have not dabbled with any of the OpenClaw ecosystem (yet) but I’ve used Claude enough on non-coding local tasks that I wanted to give Claude Cowork a try.
Cowork is a native app that lets Claude do more file and local machine manipulation. Specifically, combined with the Chrome extension that lets Claude access and drive a browser session.
Recently, I’ve started adding a few more home automation sensors like door sensors and lights. I’m using Home Assistant to organize and build automations. The Home Assistant UI is extensive but creating automations gets unwieldy, especially when you have a few dozen and want to refactor across automations.
This seemed like it’d be a perfect test run of Cowork + Chrome for Cowork.
The first task I gave it was creating a better default dashboard. I’m sure I could have fiddled my way to something usable, but Claude with just a little direction created a dashboard that was admittedly better than what I could have gotten to, and definitely not in the one or two minutes it took.
Satisified that it was doing reasonable things, I decided to tackle my automations.
First, I had it create a couple that I had wanted but hadn’t gotten to yet, like use tomorrow’s forecast and enable notifications to tell me to open and close windows & doors if the day was going to be warm and another one that would send me a nightly report that everything was locked up and turned off.
The fun one: if I signaled that I was leaving on a bike ride (by clicking a new iOS widget on my lock screen), my garage door would automatically open when I got close to the house so I could roll straight in.
That all worked so I asked Claude to look over all the automations and refactor for redundancy, standardize how the notifications looked, and fix any weird gotchas. It gave me a list of 17 things it found, and I went through each one and gave feedback (eg, do it, do it but with this tweak, ignore this one) and it ripped through the changes.
This was a fun way to spend a morning and I was pleased with how effortless it was to now change something that had been previously fiddly.