Module 11 — Cowork power features: schedules, artifacts, plugins

Cowork adds a few capabilities aimed at non-developers that are worth knowing even if you mainly use Claude Code.

Scheduled tasks

You can ask for work to run automatically, later or on a repeat: “every morning at 6, give me a news briefing,” “remind me in an hour,” “each Monday, summarize the team’s progress.” Claude sets up a scheduled task that fires on its own.

The tell is any phrase about cadence (“every,” “each,” “daily”) or a future time. One-off “summarize yesterday’s email” runs now; “summarize my email every morning” gets scheduled.

Artifacts (live pages)

Normally an answer is a one-time thing. An artifact is a small self-contained page Claude builds that persists and refreshes — every time you open it, it pulls fresh data from your connectors. A project status board, a weekly metrics page, a hiring pipeline you check each morning.

The rule of thumb: if you’d want to look at this answer again tomorrow with updated numbers, make it an artifact instead of a chat message.

Plugins and marketplaces

A plugin is an installable bundle that can contain skills, commands, agents, hooks, and connectors all at once — a complete capability pack. Plugins are grouped into marketplaces you can browse and install from.

This is how you go from a blank setup to a role-tailored one (a “marketer” pack, a “data analyst” pack) in a couple of clicks, rather than writing every skill and command yourself. Installed plugins drop their pieces into your .claude folder, where they behave exactly like the ones you’d make by hand.

The desktop extras

Cowork also has direct file access to a folder you choose, a sandboxed Linux shell for running code, and the ability to create real deliverables (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .pdf) and hand them back to you as clickable files. The same skill-and-context machinery from Stage 2 powers all of it.

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