Comment by shanewei

5 hours ago

What do you miss from the Desktop app that the CLI doesn’t cover? I’m mostly on Linux too and have just been using the CLI, so I’m curious.

26 comments

shanewei

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SyneRyder  5 hours ago

I don't think the CLI offers daily routines under the Anthropic subscription anymore?

There's also the cross conversation memory search, which uses a different conversation dataset (the Claude Web / Claude.AI conversations) than Claude Code does. I'm not even sure Claude Code does cross conversation search?

The Desktop interface also presents Markdown as formatted text and presents artifacts (especially interactive ones) better than the CLI can.

All that said - I actually use the CLI for nearly everything (even on Windows). Rather than use Claude Desktop for daily "routines" that are capped at 15 total cron-jobs and use extra usage credits, I think I'll continue building my own minimal harness and move my routines to models from other providers.

  • filoleg  4 hours ago

    > I don't think the CLI offers daily routines under the Anthropic subscription anymore?

    It (Claude Code) does, I discovered it by accident recently, having never used daily routines before. Haven't touched Claude Desktop at all, outside of playing with it for 30 mins or so months ago.

    TLDR: I used Claude Code to build a command that scrapes job postings from a few employers I am interested in (it is a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist). At the end CC asked me "do you want me to re-run it daily?" I said yes, and it generated a daily routine and gave me a URL to my anthropic account page where I can see all my daily routines.

    There, it says that I am currently using up 1 out of 15 "free" daily routines that come with my personal subscription, and I would have to pay extra if I want to have more than 15 active at a time (I assume by switching to per-token pricing for anything beyond 15, but not sure).

  • Avicebron  4 hours ago

    > All that said - I actually use the CLI for nearly everything (even on Windows).

    I also haven't touched routines, but I use cc to write automation tasks that will integrate a model when I need an inference layer. Which I also did before routines..

    Have people actually been using routines effectively?

  • tstrimple  4 hours ago

    > There's also the cross conversation memory search, which uses a different conversation dataset (the Claude Web / Claude.AI conversations) than Claude Code does. I'm not even sure Claude Code does cross conversation search?

    This is one of the first things I “fixed” with skills and hooks. I index every conversation in SQLite and have a skill which knows what to do when I ask it to search the index. I had to avoid the word memory because it’s too tied up in other parts of the context. It even indexes across my different machines. I set this up because I have terrible context discipline. I’ll go off on a tangent in one context and start planning and sometimes implementing something based on that thread which really deserves its own context. Afterward I can create the new context and move relevant bits to it, but I’d lose that initial starting conversation which inherently has more data than the summary in the new context.

    I also use a few different related contexts. One where I’m building a game engine in zig and another talking about game ideas. There’s a lot of back and forth going on there which needs some shared context. I solve this with a combination of Claude.md references and that searchable session index.

    Everything I do with scheduled tasks are just wired up with systemd and simple scripts. No LLM in the critical execution path. Again a skill tells CC how I manage those scheduled things so I just have to say something like “run this every day at midnight” and CC has reliably taken care of the rest.

Recursing  5 hours ago

1. Same experience as my non-Linux coworkers, so we can share learnings and processes

2. Scheduled tasks that run locally ( https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13854387-schedule-rec... ) importantly different from Claude Code routines

3. Multiple projects/isolated memories in the same folder

4. Better UI

  • nozzlegear  4 hours ago

    > Scheduled tasks that run locally ( https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13854387-schedule-rec... ) importantly different from Claude Code routines

    What do people do with these? I don't use Claude but when I did I couldn't think of anything useful to do with the routines. I'm probably not being imaginative enough.

    • jeroenhd  1 hour ago

      At work, I have my Claude set up to go through the issue tracker, source control, dashboards, team Slack channels, calendar appointments, and have it look for things like upcoming scheduling issues and deadlines that might get tough. A lot of those services need a corporate VPN or access to my local machine for the LLM to get the information right.

      Nothing I can't do myself (and generally I do keep an eye on that sort of thing), but it did catch a holiday for my foreign team members that seemed to have gone unnoticed, and remarked about a status mismatch between Jira and source control that made the dashboard misrepresent progress. It's not much, but it's an extra little check that works quite well.

      Another trick I'm experimenting with is having Claude rebase my open PRs waiting for review every day, and auto-solving conflicts when they arise. I don't trust it enough to let it push code to the repository, but I think I have the prompt set up in such a way that I might soon start using it.

    • thewebguyd  2 hours ago

      Cowork is pretty useful for non-technical folk for things you'd traditionally just write a quick little bash or python script for (which really, is what Cowork is doing behind the scenes anyway).

      I've gotten good results using it at work for keeping track of expense receipts. I dump them into an "Inbox" folder and Claude will OCR them, convert any images to PDF, rename, and move them into year/month/date folders and classify them (cost centers, based on a mapping and examples I gave it). This runs daily, checking the Inbox directory for new items.

      My next step is getting it to pull them from my email automatically for me as well, or from a specific alias so when I take a pic of a receipt on the go I can just email it and have Claude rename and organize it for me, then it all gets sent off to AP at the end of the month.

      Non technical knowledge workers have all kinds of little admin tasks like that which Cowork can do for them, where previously they lacked the skills or will to just learn some python and script it themselves.

    • baq  4 hours ago

      I’d like the thing to read my mail twice a day and tell me if I missed something important.

      Haven’t set it up because I’m horrified by the thought of it reading my mail. Doubly so if it decides to do anything other than telling me if I missed something important.

dahkenangnon  5 hours ago

The CLI is good for coding tasks but for other things non coding related, having the desktop app can be very useful

davydm  5 hours ago

Mainly: true sandbox separation. I don't want the model having full access to my machine. With a dump format that Claude understands, I'm able to pass only the files I want Claude to see, and he can't break any of them. I don't care about setting up access lists and so on. I don't trust that the cli product will be properly sanboxed and it's quite clear their software offerings are largely aigen code, and I catch bugs from Claude every day. I also get useful stuff, so it's worth it, but definitely not worth it, imo, to grant it any access to my machine.