One of my favorite parts of shipping a product is finding out how people actually use it. Not how we intended them to use it—how they bend it, repurpose it, surprise us with it. That’s when you learn what you really built.

Karo Zieminski, writing for Product with Attitude, captures a great example of this in her breakdown of Anthropic’s Cowork launch. She quotes Anthropic engineer Boris Cherny:

Since we launched Claude Code, we saw people using it for all sorts of non-coding work: conducting vacation research, creating slide presentations, organizing emails, cancelling subscriptions, retrieving wedding photos from hard drives, tracking plant growth, and controlling ovens.

Controlling ovens. I love it. Users took a coding tool and turned it into a general-purpose assistant because that’s what they needed it to be.

Simon Willison had already spotted this:

Claude Code is a general agent disguised as a developer tool. What it really needs is a UI that doesn’t involve the terminal and a name that doesn’t scare away non-developers.

That’s exactly what Anthropic shipped in Cowork. Same engine, new packaging, name that doesn’t say “developers only.”

This is the beauty of what we do. Once you create something, it’s really up to users to show you how it should be used. Your job is to pay attention—and have the humility to build what the behavior is asking for, not what your roadmap says.