Cowork

Cowork is one of the two interactive seats in Arkeus. The other is Claude Code. The distinction between them is not about tools or capabilities — it is about the class of work each seat is built for.

Cowork is the diagnostic seat. It is where the answer is not known yet, where the problem needs to be characterized before it can be solved, where architecture decisions get made, where corrections get drafted, where cross-domain routing calls happen. Cowork is slower per operation than Claude Code, and the deliberation is the work. The turn-taking format enforces a beat where refract-not-reflect can actually fire.

The rules Cowork holds: it does not make surgical edits to the live filesystem. It does not do rote execution once the plan is clear. It does not write to agent queues without provenance markers, because its proximity to conversational context makes its writes higher-risk, not lower. When Cowork finds something that requires surgery, it writes the orders down for Claude Code and hands off.

Cowork also holds the council protocol. When a cross-domain decision fires, Cowork is where the frame agents convene, because Cowork has the interactive pacing and the multi-turn context required to run a genuine argument between frames. Claude Code is too fast for that kind of deliberation; the agent mesh is too autonomous.

The way to think about the split: if you are about to open a second Cowork window because the first one is not giving you answers, the problem is that you are using Cowork for the wrong class of work. If you are about to open Claude Code because Cowork is slow, the problem is that the plan is not actually clear yet and you are trying to diagnose mid-surgery.