The Cowork Series

There's no official schema for Claude Desktop's Cowork session files. So I read 146 of them, diffed the fields, and documented what I found, including some surprises about what Anthropic stores locally.

High-frequency Cowork scheduled tasks can brick Claude Desktop on Windows and macOS. Root cause: the catch-up mechanism. Fix: rename one JSON file.

The Claude in Chrome file_upload tool fails with CDP error -32000 on every site. The fix is a single Chrome extension setting. Here's the one-line solution, the diagnostic that found it, and the wrong assumptions along the way.

The session manifests don't contain your conversations. The community tools don't know where to look. Here's the actual path to every Cowork message, tool call, and response, plus an audit log with per-session costs that nobody knew existed.

The same error message covers at least six different root causes. Here's the diagnostic decision tree with PowerShell commands, log locations, and fixes for each one.