Every few weeks someone posts the "right" way to set up Claude, then reverses it. They're all half right. The question was never how to set it up. It's what kind of work you're doing. Here are the four containers and when to reach for each.

Anthropic has shipped a lot in the last year. Skills. Cowork. Claude Design. Claude in Excel. Claude in Chrome. Artifacts. MCP. Claude Code. Each one is genuinely useful. None of them are obvious to a creator who just wants to know which tool does what. Here's the 5-layer framework that maps every Claude product to the job it does.