Claude's computer use - why the Chrome plugin misses the point

The missed chance

You know what’s maddening? Watching the tech world get handed a full symphony orchestra and immediately deciding they only need the second violin.

That’s Claude’s Computer Use right now. Anthropic built something that can see and interact with your entire digital workspace - every application, every window, every pixel on your screen. And what’s the first thing everyone builds? Chrome extensions. Browser plugins. Even Anthropic’s own Chrome extension limits Claude to just the browser.

It’s like we’ve learned nothing from decades of digital fragmentation - the same fragmentation that undermines AI readiness across enterprises.

The real problem

Let me paint you the actual picture of modern knowledge work. Watch any knowledge worker for a day and you’ll see the pattern:

The average employee has dozens of applications open. They’re constantly switching between them. Each switch breaks concentration. Each context change costs precious mental energy.

Think about your own workday. Email. Slack. Excel. Your CRM. That project management tool. The documentation wiki. Your code editor. Banking portal. Analytics dashboard.

You’re not working. You’re conducting a frantic relay race between disconnected tools.

And we think a browser extension is going to fix this? That’s like putting a bandaid on a severed artery and calling it surgery.

What Computer Use does

Here’s what people don’t understand: Claude’s Computer Use doesn’t just automate clicking. It understands the visual language of software itself.

Think about that for a moment.

Every application you use - Slack, Excel, Salesforce, your IDE, that proprietary tool your company built in 2003 - they all speak the same visual language. Buttons look like buttons. Text fields look like text fields. Menus behave like menus.

Claude can now read this language fluently. Across every application. Simultaneously.

It’s not a browser automation tool. It’s a universal software translator.

My experience with this

When I was growing up in Kenya, I watched my music teacher struggle with something called a “symphony desk” - this massive piece of furniture designed to hold all the sheet music for different instruments. Violin parts here, brass there, percussion in another drawer. The conductor had to physically shuffle between sections, losing the flow of the entire piece.

That’s our desktops now. Each application is a different section of the orchestra, physically separated, requiring constant shuffling. We’re not conducting a symphony; we’re running a relay race between music stands.

Computer Use changes this. One view. All instruments. Real conducting.

Why everyone gets this wrong

I’ll tell you exactly why we’re seeing this Chrome extension gold rush:

Fear of scope. A browser is contained. Predictable. Safe. You can’t accidentally delete system files or expose sensitive data outside the browser sandbox. It’s the kiddie pool of automation.

Existing systems. Chrome’s extension API is mature. Well-documented. Thousands of examples. Why think harder when you can think easier?

Venture capital theater. “We’re building the Chrome extension for Claude” fits on a slide. “We’re rebuilding how computers interface with human intention” doesn’t. Guess which one gets funded faster?

But here’s the thing - we’re improving for the wrong numbers. We’re measuring “time saved on browser tasks” when we should be measuring “cognitive load eliminated from workflow fragmentation.” This disconnect between numbers and reality is exactly what leads to the process failures we see in AI incidents.

The fragmentation issue

Your work data isn’t in your browser. It’s scattered across what I call the seven-layer productivity cake:

1. Communication layer: Slack, Teams, Discord, email
2. Documentation layer: Notion, Confluence, Google Docs, wikis
3. Data layer: Excel, Sheets, Airtable, databases
4. Development layer: VS Code, GitHub, terminal, Docker
5. Customer layer: CRM, support tickets, user analytics
6. Financial layer: QuickBooks, Stripe, banking portals
7. Proprietary layer: That custom tool only your company uses

A Chrome extension touches maybe one and a half layers. Computer Use coordinates all seven.

What this means for work

Forget the small improvements. Think about what becomes possible when AI can see everything you see:

The Monday Morning Ritual: Instead of spending 45 minutes gathering data from six different tools for your weekly report, you describe what you need. The AI pulls from everywhere, assembles it, and presents it for review.

The Customer Fire Drill: Support ticket comes in. Instead of you jumping between the CRM, codebase, logs, and documentation, the AI instantly correlates the issue across all systems and presents the full context.

The Proposal Dance: No more copy-pasting between pricing spreadsheets, document templates, and CRM data. One request, full coordination, complete proposal.

This isn’t about saving minutes. It’s about preserving cognitive flow.

The adoption problem

Most companies aren’t ready for this. Not technically - that’s the easy part. Culturally. As I’ve discussed when looking at how to communicate AI changes effectively, the human side is always harder than the technical side.

We’ve spent decades building walls between applications. Security walls. Process walls. Departmental walls. Computer Use makes those walls clear. That terrifies the people who built their careers managing those walls.

But here’s what I learned building Tallyfy: The companies that break down these walls first don’t just get more efficient. They get fundamentally different capabilities. They start solving problems that siloed companies can’t even see.

What happens next

The smart money isn’t on Chrome extensions. It’s on the platforms that embrace total workspace orchestration.

Think about it: Why should you need to know which application contains which data? Why should you care whether something lives in Slack or email or Notion? You want answers, not treasure hunts.

The winners will be the ones who realize Computer Use isn’t about automating browsers. It’s about making the entire concept of application switching obsolete.

My prediction

In five years, we’ll look back at Chrome extensions for AI the way we look at WAP browsers for mobile. A necessary stepping stone that completely missed the point.

The real revolution isn’t in making browsers smarter. It’s in making the computer itself comprehensible to AI. When that happens - when AI can truly see and coordinate everything we do digitally - the idea of manual application switching will seem as antiquated as hand-copying manuscripts.

But sure, let’s build another Chrome extension.

Because apparently, that’s what new thinking looks like now: Taking a technology that could change human-computer interaction and stuffing it into a browser toolbar.

Sometimes I wonder if we deserve better tools, or if we get exactly the tools we ask for.