The 3 Parts of Claude Every Agent Needs to Understand (And When to Use Each)

When agents hear about Claude, they usually hear about it through a 60-second reel or a post that says something like “Claude saved me 20 hours this week.”

What those posts don’t show is how Claude is actually organized or where to start.

In a recent podcast, The Broke Agent spoke with Haley Ingram, founder and CEO of Coffee & Contracts, who broke down exactly how the three features that matter most work and when to use each one.

Haley uses Claude daily in her own business and walks through the whole thing from setup to automation. Get this part right and everything else gets a lot easier.

Cowork: Where You’ll Spend Most of Your Time

The free chat version of Claude lets you connect your tools and have conversations with them. You can ask Claude what’s on your calendar, have it pull up a recent email, or ask it to analyze data from your CRM.

That’s useful, but it’s not what’s driving the viral posts.

Cowork is available with a paid version of Claude, and it’s where Claude starts acting on your tools instead of just reading them.

Haley put it this way:

“The reason that Claude had this big explosion of relevance and kind of overshadowed ChatGPT is because of its ability to access tools so easily. So when you are using the Chat version, the free version, you can still link your tools…and you can chat with Claude about your tools or read that email.

“But with Cowork, it can actually log in and do things on your behalf.”

Here’s what Cowork can do for a real estate agent’s business:

• Build a morning dashboard that pulls from your email, calendar, CRM, and project management tool simultaneously
• Schedule that dashboard to run every morning at a set time with no input required from you
• Time-block your calendar automatically
• Populate Canva templates with your city name, your name, and uploaded photos for hyper-local content
• Draft emails directly into your inbox
• Send a recap at the end of the day showing where your hours went

To access Cowork, you need the paid version of Claude at $20 per month. Haley’s take on whether it’s worth it:

“In order to really use Claude in the way that everyone’s talking about, you do need the $20 version.”

Skills: The Feature That Makes Claude Actually Work for You

Once you’re in Cowork, Skills are what turn Claude from a smart assistant into a system that runs without you. Most agents skip this step because it takes time to set up, and that’s exactly why most agents aren’t getting the results they keep seeing other people post about.

A Skill is a saved SOP. Here’s how Haley describes it:

“A Skill is essentially like a standard operating procedure or like guidelines that you are giving Claude that anytime that you mention this specific task, it’ll run that Skill automatically. 

“So, for example, if you have an email newsletter that you send out every week, instead of every time you go into Claude saying, ‘Hey, I want to write my email newsletter, here’s the details, here’s what we’re doing.’ You just say, ‘I need to write the email newsletter.'”

Here’s how to create a new Skill in Claude:

1. Do the task with Claude once, going back and forth until the output is right
2. Tell Claude to save it as a Skill
3. The next time you need it, type a backslash and select the Skill, or just describe the task in plain language, and Claude will recognize what you mean
4. Optionally, schedule the Skill to run automatically at a set time with no prompt from you at all

That last point is where the time savings actually come from. When a Skill is scheduled, Claude is executing tasks before you’ve even opened the app.

Skills also reduce the cost of using Claude:

“Skills save you credits because it’s not having to figure things out in real time. When Claude already figured out how to do something, and you work with it on something, you can say, save this as a Skill, and then it skips all of those steps the next time that it runs. So it doesn’t have to go searching for things and using up your credits. 

“It saves you credits because it knows exactly where to go and what to do, and it’ll do it faster.”

The framing Haley uses for her own business: Claude is your assistant, and Skills are the handbook you give it. The better the handbook, the less you have to manage the assistant.

One maintenance note worth keeping in mind: if you build a Skill and stop using it, delete it or archive it. A setup loaded with unused Skills creates the same kind of contextual noise you were probably trying to leave behind in ChatGPT.

Projects: Useful, But Not What Most Agents Think

Projects are context containers. They narrow Claude’s focus to a specific set of files and information, so it isn’t pulling from the wrong area of your business when you’re trying to get something specific done.

Most agents starting out won’t need them. Haley is direct about when they actually make sense:

“The only time that I feel like I want to use a Project is when I’m doing specific things in different departments. So, for example, I have two Projects right now because I want Claude to focus on the context that I’m giving it in those areas, and those are my CEO dashboard… 

“Then when I’m copywriting marketing for Coffee & Contracts and working on our marketing stuff, I’m going through the copywriting agent Project because I want it to just keep that context.”

The clearest use cases for agents:

• You run two separate businesses, like real estate and interior design, and need Claude to stay focused on one at a time
• You want your marketing context completely separated from your operations and strategy so Claude isn’t blending the two

If neither of those applies to you right now, focus on building Skills. Claude’s general memory already holds a significant amount of context, and Projects are for when you need to narrow that focus intentionally.

How the Three Work Together

Cowork, Skills, and Projects are three layers of one system, and the sequence is important to get right:

1. Set up Cowork first: connect your tools and let Claude analyze your existing content to build your brand guidelines
2. Identify the first recurring task you want to hand off and build a Skill around it before you try to build anything else
3. Add Projects only once you have a clear reason to separate context between two distinct areas of your business

Haley’s mental model for the whole thing:

“The best way to think about it is more like a partner and someone that you can use to go find the information, analyze the data, make shortcuts for you to make things easier, create dashboards for you that create views better, help you think through things and think through it through different angles. 

“So really looking at it as like it gets you most of the way there and then you finish it with your own touch.”

That’s the right expectation to bring into Claude (or any agentic AI).

If you’re just getting acquainted with Claude Pro, start with Cowork setup this week and build from there.