I thought I was pushing Claude pretty hard. Turns out I was using maybe 30% of what it can actually do.
Then I ran into this post from a LinkedIn creator who laid out the full 2026 Claude setup, and I realized most of us are still operating on 2024 habits. Four tabs. Four completely different workflows. And almost nobody uses all of them together.
I want to walk you through what this savvy professional put together, because it’s genuinely the cleanest cheat sheet I’ve seen for getting real work done with Claude this year.
The baseline setup
Before any of the cool stuff works, the creator points out three prerequisites most people skip:
- Download the Claude desktop app. Not the browser tab, the actual app. The desktop version unlocks features that just don’t exist on the web.
- Grab a Pro plan ($20/month). The author calls it worth every cent, and honestly the rest of this cheat sheet basically requires it.
- Learn the four tabs. Chat, Cowork, Code, and Projects. Each one does something the others can’t. Most folks live in Chat and never leave.
Once that’s done, everything below becomes available.
1. Cowork: Claude working inside your computer
This is the tab that blew me away when the original poster described it. Cowork lets Claude operate directly on your local files. You point it at a folder, drop in a few markdown docs (the expert suggests about-me.md, anti-ai-style.md, and my-company.md), and Claude reads them before every task.
You can set Global Instructions so the context loads automatically. The best part? Claude generates clickable forms inside the conversation. No typing long prompts. You click, answer, and go. That one shift alone cut my setup time on big tasks by about half.
2. Projects: persistent memory for your team
If Cowork is about your machine, Projects is about your shared brain. The LinkedIn user describes it as the place to dump your brand docs, writing samples, and data once, then chat inside the Project forever.
Here’s the flow:
- Head to claude.ai and click Projects in the sidebar
- Upload your reference material
- Set custom instructions for how Claude should behave inside it
- Start chatting inside the Project
Every conversation inside that Project remembers everything you’ve loaded. No more re-explaining your brand voice, your audience, or your rules every single time. I think this is the feature most teams undervalue the hardest, especially agencies and content shops.
3. Skills: slash commands that fire on demand
This one is wild. The author explains that Skills are basically slash commands you build once and use forever. Open Cowork and prompt: Use the skill-creator to build a skill for [your task]. Claude interviews you, builds the Skill, and you upload it.
After that, typing /brief (or whatever you named it) anywhere triggers the whole workflow automatically. No more re-pasting prompts. No more wondering what your format was. The creator also points you to Customize, then Personal plugins, then the plus sign to browse what other folks have already shared.
4. Code: your $0.66-a-day junior developer
The creator frames Claude Code as a junior dev that never sleeps, and at a couple of bucks a week, the math is absurd. Connect your free GitHub account, describe what you want in plain English, attach a screenshot if you have one, and Claude builds it and pushes it live.
The original poster recommends installing VS Code and turning on bypass permissions to run roughly 10x faster. You literally edit code by talking to it. Change colors with a sentence. Add a feature with a paragraph. Fix a bug by describing what you see.
The model choice that actually matters
Here’s the pro tip from the author that I want to highlight, because it’s the one most people get wrong:
For complex tasks, pick Opus 4.6 with Extended Thinking on. For quick stuff, use Sonnet.
That’s it. Opus for strategy, research, deep coding. Sonnet for fast drafts, summaries, classification. Mixing the two based on the job saves money and gets better output. I’d been defaulting to whatever was already selected, and that’s a mistake most users make.
Why this cheat sheet actually matters
What I love about how this industry pro laid it out is that each tab solves a different problem:
- Chat handles one-off questions
- Projects handles ongoing context for a team or brand
- Cowork handles your local environment and files
- Code handles building real software
- Skills glue it all together with reusable workflows
Used separately, each one is useful. Used together, you basically have a full AI operating system running on your machine for twenty bucks a month. That’s the shift the creator is pointing at. It’s not that Claude got better. The interface around Claude got better, and almost nobody has updated their habits.
If you’ve been living in the Chat tab since 2024, pick one of the other three this week. Set up a Project with your brand docs. Or spin up Cowork with those three markdown files. You’ll feel the difference immediately.
Check out the full LinkedIn post for the expert’s complete walkthrough and setup tips.