The first time we saw someone type "AFK" in Slack, we had to google it. It means “Away From Keyboard.” Engineers use it to flag that they're not at their desk, that they’re not available, and can’t take on whatever task you’re asking them to.
It was a reasonable thing to say until Anthropic made some (more) crazy updates this week.
The Anthropic Team is Cooking
Anthropic upgraded Claude Cowork and Claude Code to autonomously control your computer, including your mouse. keyboard, browser, and apps.
You give it a task and it figures out how to move through your machine to complete it. It opens files, fills forms, pulls data from documents, interacts with tools like Slack or Google Calendar. If a direct connector exists, it uses that. If not, it watches your screen and clicks around like a person would.
The feature that makes this interesting is called Dispatch. Your desktop sits at home. If you’re out, you can send a task from your phone: “pull this data, check these emails, build this deck,” and Claude executes it while you're gone. In other words, you’re AFK, but Claude isn’t, and Claude has your back.
This video explains it all:
It’s worth noting that this is for Mac-only, for Pro and Max subscribers to start. Anthropic is upfront that it'll make mistakes and shouldn't touch sensitive data yet. It asks for permission before touching anything. It's not fully autonomous, but it's an extremely capable assistant.
The Bigger Number
In the last 52 days, Anthropic shipped 50+ major updates to Claude.
Thats a very full calendar
If you want to know how people actually feel about something, skip the press release and go to Reddit. That's where the people who live inside these tools every day go to say what they really think.
"50 updates in 52 days from a team of 9 engineers is genuinely absurd. Most companies I've worked at take 52 days to update the office WiFi password."
We’ve never seen technology move this quickly. If you blink, you’ll miss something transformative.
The Insight That's Easy to Miss
There was a comment in the thread that stuck with us more than any of the feature announcements:
"People who say only new models matter are sleeping on the tooling improvements. Half of what makes Claude useful now is the ecosystem around it, not just the raw model."
For the last two years, the AI conversation has been almost entirely about benchmark scores and new model releases — which model is smarter, which one codes better, who won the eval. That framing is getting outdated fast.
What people are actually using and paying for is the workflow. That's the actual shift happening: the ability to run Claude Code across a local folder, control your desktop remotely from your phone, pick up where you left off across sessions. The infrastructure that lets the model act instead of just answer.
The model is the engine. The tooling is the car. And right now, Anthropic is building the car faster than anyone.
Back to AFK
“Away From Keyboard” used to mean the work stops.
We'll see how much longer that holds…
Stay curious,
Julia & Russell
