Gotchas, Limits & Anti-Patterns
Gotchas, Limits & Anti-Patterns
The Folder Sprawl Problem
Cowork creates files. Without rules, your workspace turns into a junkyard.
Open your workspace folder after a month of real use. Count the files. There's summary.md, summary-final.md, summary-v2.md, and summary-final-actual.md. There's a draft.md you don't recognize, an analysis.md from a task you finished and forgot, and four loose CSVs Cowork pulled apart and never put back. None of it is labeled by date. None of it is in a project folder.
You didn't make this mess on purpose. Cowork made most of it, one helpful file at a time, and you let it.
That's the trap. Cowork reads from and writes to your local files without asking you to upload or download anything; that's the whole point of it. But every task it runs tends to leave artifacts behind: a draft, an export, an intermediate file it created to think. Nobody cleans those up, because cleaning up isn't anyone's job by default.
The tool isn't sloppy. Your workspace just has no rules about where things go. That's fixable, and the fix is a one-time setup plus a small recurring habit.