I think this is becoming harder to ignore. Across Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft, the emerging shape is not quite a "super app," but perhaps more kind of an anti-app.
An application—from Latin 'applicatio', attach to—is something we attach ourselves to: a specialised place for a specialised use case. The new workbenches just do the opposite. They 'detach' work from those fixed entry points, letting intent travel across use cases—and invoking the applications, tools and systems required along the way.
Anthropic now groups Home and Code, then Chat and Cowork within Home. OpenAI is now bringing Codex into the ChatGPT desktop app, alongside Work. Microsoft puts the full Cowork experience behind its main Copilot chat. Different names, but the same emerging grammar: conversation, delegated work, context, tools, skills/plugins and long-running execution gathered in one place.
The cloud move—and the mobile "Dispatch" layer it enables—is especially revealing. It does not only make the desktop workbench portable. It gives it autonomous persistence: routines, scouts and delegated tasks can continue while the user is away, then surface again for steering and judgment.
That is a real break from the cloud workbench of the past decade, which mostly transposed the office triad of the 1990s—documents, spreadsheets and presentations—into the browser. Notion and its peers had already begun to crack that paradigm, turning applications into shared units of information—blocks and relational tables—inside a traversable workspace. Perhaps they were the precursors to the markdown hierarchies that now form a kind of second brain for our coworkers.
The emerging workbench is not another cloud office suite. It is the operating layer that traverses them.
Agency at the edge; autonomous continuity in the cloud.
