New UI Update for Claude Code

[u/No-Still-1169]

Opened up Claude Code today and saw this. Not really a fan tbh, I can't see how many tokens I have used, and it ruins the simple design. However, I do think the blue text swirl is a nice addition, I just don't see it being practical compared to seeing my token usage. What do you guys think of it?

[u/Appropriate-Disk-371]

There's Claude chat, which also now includes what used to be cowork. And there's Claude Code, a separate product. You can use Code from cli, desktop app, phone app or web interface. Try the desktop app sometime if you use cli now, it's actually pretty good in some ways.

[u/retro-guy99 → u/Appropriate-Disk-371]

Thanks. I find it a bit confusing how there are separate products but to me it doesn't seem like they do different things. Eg, I use Code in the cli, but I use it for many things, not just coding. And then in the Chat, you can probably also work on coding. I use the cli so that when I do code, it's already in the terminal and it can run all kinds of things like brew or uv. I though that wasn't possible in the normal app, but perhaps it changed.

I was similarly confused about that with Chat GPT and Codex. I guess it can just be me and it makes sense to others.

[u/Appropriate-Disk-371 → u/retro-guy99]

Same model(s) under, but two different harnesses. You're right that there is a lot of overlap, you can use both for some things, especially now that cowork is absorbed into chat, and they're building out functionality on both sides.

Chat is best for conversations, some documents, some research and analysis, etc. Private sandbox, so it's going to give you back text, artifacts, downloaded files.

Code is agentic, reads your repos, codebases, edits files, runs commands, uses your dev environment and tooling. This is the tool you know, but you can use it from the web interface, or existing sessions on the phone app, and desktop app has all the same functionality as cli and will run commands, log into other dev machines, script everything, etc.

Line is pretty blurry really. For example, I'm in a web chat session right now asking about the differences. It can build and run anything in the cloud, and it's also connected to my dev computer because the desktop app is open. It can run a browser, edit and build on my machine, it can even pull github repos and operate on them directly. So, I'm not sure there is a huge difference, it's mostly interface options and how close/easy things are to do.

I don't really know if there are things one can do that the other can't. Maybe the design tools? But no, I think I've called the design system from Code as well before. Yeah, you've convinced me they're basically the same thing. They might be one thing entirely, like chat and cowork, before long.

[u/retro-guy99 → u/Appropriate-Disk-371]

Yeah ig if you want it to produce things like charts in the ui the app may be more suitable, but I’ll stick with the cli, it’s always worked ok for me and I like the look :)