Claude Duet, one week in: how two early users run it
The short version
Wondering what Claude Duet looks like on an ordinary workday?
Two early users have now shown theirs.
Creator Riley Brown sorts his work into a few channels, edits slide decks by talking to his phone on a walk, and keeps a channel that reminds him of things he made and forgot. Claire Vo had it pull her sales pipeline together from apps it was already connected to.
Both also name real rough edges, from a confusing maze of threads to a voice mode that trails rival apps.
Quick terms: an agent is an AI helper that takes steps for you, not just chat. A channel in Duet is a named side conversation, like a Slack channel, where related work collects. An artifact is something Duet makes for you, such as a slide deck or a document.
A connector links Claude to another app you use, such as Gmail or Slack. A scheduled task is a job set to run on its own at set times.
Where we left Duet
When we first covered Claude Duet on Oct 21, 2026, every example came from Anthropic’s own announcement (Agent Snacks: Claude Duet Main Course).
Duet is Anthropic’s research-preview app where Claude works as a proactive agent: it watches your connected apps, takes on chores you hand it and asks before it sends, pays, signs or deletes anything (Anthropic: Claude Duet announcement).
Now two people outside Anthropic have walked through how they use it. Riley Brown posted a video called “How I’m Actually Using Claude Duet (After 10 Hours of Testing)” (Riley Brown on YouTube: how he uses Claude Duet).
Claire Vo covered it on her show How I AI, in an episode titled “Claude Duet Is Beautiful. That Doesn’t Make It My Go-To Agent.” (How I AI: Claire Vo’s Claude Duet sales-pipeline workflow). Everything below is what they describe; Agent Snacks did not use the app.
Plays from YouTube when you press play.
Video Summary
- Riley Brown keeps a few Duet channels (content, finances, artifacts); the main chat hands each request to the matching channel.
- Every task opens its own thread; a make tab collects what Duet has built, and phone and web stay in sync.
- His favorite workflow: take the phone on a walk, open a slide deck and voice a whole list of edits in one pass.
- An artifacts channel runs a scheduled Artifact recap that reminds him of drafts he started and forgot.
- Complaints: three layers of chats get confusing, real-time voice trails OpenAI’s Dots, no model or effort picker, no local Claude Code sessions, and approvals before sending messages, payments and deletions.
Channels: one main chat, a few side rooms
The first thing Brown noticed is that Duet isn’t personified. Instead it has channels, which he says remind him of Slack. You talk to one main agent, and when a request belongs to a topic, Duet hands it to that channel.
Ask about content and it lands in the content channel.
His tip is to keep the list short. He says he made about ten channels, then deleted most because they added clutter. He kept three: content, finances and artifacts.
Every task also gets its own thread. When he asked the main chat for a slide deck, Duet passed the job to his content channel, worked on it for about ten minutes and posted a link when the deck was ready.
Clicking it opened a separate task thread where every change to that deck lives. A make tab collects everything Duet has built.
Editing a deck by voice
This is the part Brown calls his favorite. Duet makes a first version of a deck, and then he edits it out loud. “I actually take my phone for a walk,” he says.
He opens the deck, turns on voice and talks through every change in one go: a line break in a title, bigger text, a small gray graphic on one slide, a new standalone slide after slide 19. When he stops recording, Duet works through the whole list.
Short requests work too. From his phone he asked Duet to add a bonus slide about voice dictation to the end of the presentation he had been working on in the content channel.
Duet replied in that channel, added the slide, and the change showed up in the web app too, since the phone and web versions stay in sync.
On the web, he also uses a comment tool: leave a comment on a slide and it goes straight to Duet, which makes the edit.
The channel that remembers for you
His most borrowable idea is a channel just for artifacts. Channels can hold routines, and his artifacts channel has a scheduled task called an artifact recap.
In the video it’s set to run from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and nudges him about things he made earlier, along the lines of: you made this deck yesterday, want to keep going?
His reason: AI jobs can run for 15 to 40 minutes, so he works on several things at once and loses track of some. The recap channel brings them back.
“It’s pretty easy to get lost between channels, tasks, and threads.” Riley Brown, on YouTube
A sales pipeline from apps it already knows
Vo’s example is shorter and very practical. “I had it look at my sales pipeline,” she says in the episode. Duet was already connected to her Slack, her email and her CRM (the tool that tracks customers and deals), so it could pull that data together quickly.
That matches how Anthropic describes setup: Duet carries over the memory, skills and connected apps from your Claude account, so there is little to configure (Anthropic: Claude Duet announcement).
The workflow page from her show suggests checking those connections in your main Claude account first, then asking from your phone for a pipeline summary across your CRM, recent customer email and your sales Slack channel.
Its last step is the one that matters: compare the summary with what you know before you act on it.
The rough edges they ran into
Neither of them is selling it. Vo’s episode title says it is not her go-to agent. Brown lists his complaints at the end:
- Too many layers. A main chat, channel chats and task chats make it easy to lose your place.
- Voice trails rivals. He finds Duet’s real-time voice well behind OpenAI’s Dots, and he couldn’t find a way to mute himself.
- No model or effort picker. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5 and sets the effort for you. Anthropic’s help page also says you can’t pick a model during the preview (Claude Help Center: get started with Claude Duet).
- No local Claude Code sessions. He says Duet can start a Claude Code session in the cloud but not one on his own computer, where his video-editing files live.
- Approvals. It asked before sending messages and before deleting an item from a Notion database. He wanted slightly fewer prompts but sees why deletions get one. That is Anthropic’s design: Duet waits for your OK before it sends, pays, signs or deletes (Anthropic: Claude Duet announcement).
If you have an invite
Duet is still a research preview by waitlist for Claude Pro and Max subscribers (Agent Snacks: Claude Duet Main Course). If you’re in, the two setups above make an easy first week:
- Start with three channels at most, named for the work you actually do.
- Add an artifacts channel with a daily recap so half-finished drafts come back to you.
- Ask for a first draft by text, then do the edits by voice in one long pass.
- Before a summary task like a pipeline review, check that the right apps are connected in your Claude account.
Chef’s pick: set up the artifacts recap channel first. It’s the one idea here that fixes a problem Duet itself creates, all those drafts running in the background.