Claude Cowork Masterclass
An 8-module course that turns Claude Chat habits into full-project delegation — with a working folder system and delegation brief template you build during the course.
Taught by Edwin Ashdown. Founder of AIFirstPartner, 12 production AI systems shipped.
You are a knowledge worker — marketer, analyst, consultant, PM, founder, or operator — who uses Claude Chat regularly and is ready to stop delegating one prompt at a time. You do not need any coding background. You do need a paid Claude account and a willingness to point Cowork at a real folder.
Who this is not for: developers who already live in Claude Code, anyone on a free Claude plan, or anyone looking for a platform-agnostic AI strategy course.
What Cowork actually is, how it differs from Chat and Code, and the mental shift that separates people who get value from it from people who don't.
4 lessons
The folder structure, CLAUDE.md brain file, and five context files that experienced users build before they write a single task prompt.
4 lessons
The Describe → Plan → Execute → Review loop, how to steer mid-task, and all five prompting patterns — outcome-based, structured-task, phased, Socratic, and read-the-real-thing.
5 lessons
File operations at scale and document generation from scattered sources — the two use cases that sell Cowork to every knowledge worker who sees them.
3 lessons
Research synthesis, voice-consistent content workflows, and JJ Englert's daily OS: a briefing that reads your calendar, Slack, and email before you open your laptop.
3 lessons
Built-in skills, building your first custom skill with skill-creator, installing Anthropic's open-source plugins, and scheduled tasks via /schedule and Dispatch.
4 lessons
Web connectors, Projects for context isolation, the Copilot Cowork partnership, and the safety model — including what Cowork is not approved for.
2 lessons
Build your complete ClaudeCowork system and run a real delegation task end-to-end, producing a brief template you will still be using in three months.
2 lessons
Edwin Ashdown founded AIFirstPartner and has shipped 12 production AI systems for clients in government, legal, and enterprise. He is fractional CTO at Speculo, a cyber risk software company, and manages cloud and data platform engineering for a large Australian government department supporting 20+ agencies. He publishes his build process at 150days.aifirstpartner.com.
This masterclass is the setup and workflow he uses when onboarding a non-technical team onto Cowork.
Anthropic's introduction is excellent. This masterclass is the opinionated 8-module path through the same territory with exercises against your real work, a working folder system you build during the course, and a delegation brief template at the end. If you have the time to piece the free material together yourself, do that. If you want the curated path with a deliverable you actually use, this.
Max (5× or 20×) is strongly recommended for Cowork. Agentic planning and sub-agents consume 5–10× the tokens of Chat. Pro users hit limits quickly on sustained Cowork sessions. The course will tell you where you can get away with Pro and where you genuinely need Max.
No. This masterclass is designed for knowledge workers — PMs, marketers, consultants, analysts, founders, operators. No coding background required. The only prerequisite is a paid Claude account and a willingness to point Cowork at a real folder.
Claude 101 teaches you to use Claude Chat effectively — prompting, Projects, connectors, and the right surface for the right task. This masterclass assumes you already know Chat and focuses entirely on Cowork: folder structure, CLAUDE.md, the task loop, prompting patterns for delegation, skills, plugins, and automation. They are complementary, not overlapping.
Around 4 hours end-to-end if you do the exercises, spread over as many sessions as you like. Exercises use your real files so the time is productive, not academic.
Module 1 covers what Cowork is (and isn't), the three-surface model, a side-by-side demo of the same task in Chat vs Cowork, and what good delegation actually looks like. It is the whole mental model.
No. This course is independent and has not been reviewed or endorsed by Anthropic.