I'm not really sure I understand this critique. Skills and cowork are not mutually exclusive. It sits in a gap between Chat and Claude Code.

In regular Chat, I struggle to get the agent to consistently traverse certain workflows that I have. This is something that I can trivially do in Claude Code - but Claude Code wants to code (so I'm often fighting it's tendencies).

Cowork seems like it's going to allow me to use the best parts of Claude Code, without being forced to output everything to code.