Coding Agents Beyond Coding: How to Customize Claude Cowork and Experience Next-Gen Business Agents

Last year, I wrote about "Coding Agents Beyond Coding" and why agents like Claude Code shouldn't be seen as just developer tools: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/luebken_coding-agents-beyond-coding-coding-agents-activity-7414222297026486272-O5X9

Coding agents were originally designed for software development. But they've moved far beyond that. These agents run in the terminal, have Unix commands at their disposal, build memory by traversing files, and continuously expand their capabilities through skills and scripts. A few weeks ago, I demonstrated this with a terminal-based CRM built entirely around a coding agent.

Since then, we've seen another wave of important announcements:

First, Anthropic introduced Claude Cowork https://claude.com/product/cowork You can think of Cowork as a stripped-down version of Claude Code. No terminal UI and powered by VMs under the hood. The key shift is accessibility, this runtime brings agentic workflows to non-technical users.
Second, Anthropic announced Interactive Tools, also referred to as Claude Apps: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/luebken_yesterday-we-witnessed-the-app-store-moment-activity-7421663774807461888-Amu1 Built on the MCP standard, these extensions run inside the chat. They allow rich, interactive UIs, tables, controls, visualizations embedded directly in your conversation history.

As I've said before: this is the foundation for an entire new class of AI-native business applications. What's different now is that, with Cowork and Claude Apps, these systems are no longer limited to developers.

Take my Claude-Code-based CRM as an example. What if you could:

chat with your data,
visualize it in a rich, interactive table,
and iteratively extend functionality as the agent writes new scripts or even new UIs for you?

That's exactly what I built today: an interactive Markdown table powered by an agent and the Cowork runtime keeps extending it on demand. 🤯 I'm still wrapping my head around the full set of possibilities.

If you'd like to go deeper, feel free to ping me or join my webinar next week, where I'll show all of this live: "Coding Agents Beyond Coding: The Next AI Foundation for Business Workflows" https://luma.com/cx43nkc0

Originally published on LinkedIn