
Why did developers abandon polished IDEs for a terminal tool? The answer is less about AI than about Unix—a 50-year-old design philosophy of composable text tools that proves to be the perfect substrate for machine intelligence, and a preview of the AUI paradigm ahead.

Two products born from the same codebase diverge in fundamental ways. Claude Code's local execution and CoWork's managed VM architecture shape not just performance and cost, but determine three critical capabilities—resumability, attachability, and autonomy—that reveal what each system can ultimately become.