Claude Duet: 6 Hints to Put Anthropic’s Agent to Work

Anthropic’s new Claude Duet agent works in the background and comes back to you only when it needs a decision. If you are on a Pro or Max plan, you can ask it to build your morning brief, chase unpaid invoices or draft the replies waiting in your inbox. Hand it the right jobs first, and the admin that eats your mornings keeps moving while you focus on the work only you can do.

What Changed for You

Anthropic says Claude Duet is built for “professionals and small business owners with more on their plates than they can track.” It is an agent rather than a chat window: you message it the way you would message a person, by typing or recording a voice message, and it works inside the apps you have connected. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5, and it is meant to come to you with what needs attention instead of waiting to be asked. According to The Verge, the company is open about it being an early version that might misread a thread or miscalibrate what is urgent.

Getting in takes patience. It is a research preview for Pro and Max customers, available as a standalone app on iOS and Android and through Claude.ai on the web, and you have to join a waitlist. Anthropic says invitations go out in waves. Duet is included at no additional cost, though its work counts toward your plan’s usage limits. Team and Enterprise plans are not included yet, though Anthropic says it plans to expand there.

Hint 1: Wake Up to a Brief Instead of an Inbox

Each morning, Claude Duet looks across your email and calendar, picks what most needs your attention and sends you a short brief on the most important items across your connected apps. It can even start the first steps for you, such as drafting replies for you to review. The gain is simple: you stop building that picture yourself by scrolling through three apps before your first coffee. You open one message and know which thread is on fire and which meeting needs preparation.

Say you run a small studio and Monday mornings are usually lost to catching up. You could have Duet pull the emails from clients who asked for changes, flag the call you have at eleven and hand you draft replies, so your first hour goes on the work rather than on reading.

• Join the waitlist now, since Anthropic says invitations go out in waves.
• Once you are in, connect your email and calendar first, since Anthropic says the morning brief starts by looking across those two.
• Review the drafts rather than sending them blind, and correct anything it misread so later briefs get closer to what you care about.

Hint 2: Hand Over the Jobs You Keep Postponing

You can give Duet tasks of all shapes, from simple administrative work like scheduling meetings to bigger jobs such as building dashboards with dozens of tools, creating financial or sales forecasts, prototyping and building web apps. Finished work comes back as files you can review and edit, like a research brief, a financial model, a slide deck or a dashboard, and it appears in the Make tab. That is the difference between asking for advice and getting something you can open and fix.

For example, if you have been meaning to assemble a sales forecast for a partner meeting, you can describe the numbers you need and the timeframe, and go through the returned file with your own edits instead of starting from a blank spreadsheet.

• Write the job down the way you would brief a freelancer: what the file should contain, who reads it and what good looks like.
• Skip the tools question on purpose, since Duet works out which apps to use and how much effort the job takes.
• Check the Make tab for the finished file, then edit it before you send it anywhere. Treat the first draft as a starting point, not a final version.

Hint 3: Reach Your Tools Without New Integrations

Duet can connect to over 6,000 connectors and plug-ins in the Claude Marketplace, and it has its own browser in the cloud for sites that do not have a connector. It also supports plugins, such as the small business plugin, and can suggest ones that fit your work. For anyone running a small operation, a missing connector no longer has to stop a task before it starts.

Say your booking system is an old web portal with no API and no app. Instead of copying details across by hand, you can point Duet at the site and let it do the repetitive part, then check the result yourself.

• Start with the connectors you already use, and only fall back to the browser for the sites that have none.
• Let Duet suggest plugins for your type of work instead of installing everything you see, so each one earns its place in your setup.
• Test any browser-based task with something low stakes first, so you learn how it navigates that site before trusting it with real work.

Hint 4: Close the App and Let It Keep Working

Duet runs on its own cloud-based computer and has a virtual machine with a browser, so it can keep working even after you close the app. When a task finishes or needs a decision, it sends an update to your main conversation, and you can track ongoing work in a dedicated Tasks tab. That turns waiting time into working time: you can set something going before a school run or a meeting and come back to progress rather than a blank screen.

For example, you could ask for a research brief on three suppliers in the afternoon, go to a client site, and pick up the draft that evening with the sources laid out for you to check.

• Describe a job that clearly takes a while, then step away. The point of the cloud computer is that you are not needed for the middle part.
• Use the Tasks tab to see which jobs are done and which need your attention, instead of rereading the whole thread.
• Remember that only you can mark a task as finished, so build a short end-of-day check into your routine.

Hint 5: Message It Like a Person, With Channels

You message Duet the way you would message a person, by typing or recording a voice message. Your main thread stays in one place, so it picks up where you left off, and you can open separate channels for different topics that share the same memory. Because Duet uses the same memories, skills and connectors as regular Claude and can search past conversations, you do not have to reintroduce yourself each time you switch topics.

Say you juggle a product launch and your own admin. One channel can hold the launch questions, another the invoices, and neither loses the context you built in the other, because the memory is shared.

• Keep one channel for each topic that has its own thread of work, and name them so you can find them later.
• Use voice messages when you are walking or between meetings, since Duet accepts spoken instructions just like typed ones.
• Restate anything that changed since your last message. The shared memory helps, but a stale detail from last week can send a task the wrong way.

Hint 6: Get Paid and Buy Things With Your Approval

Duet has integrations with Stripe to check for unpaid invoices and draft payment reminders, plus Link and Shop Pay to make purchases with your approval. It is designed to ask before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything. For a small business, chasing late payers is the task that never gets scheduled, and drafting the reminder is most of the work. You keep the final say on anything that leaves your account.

For example, you could have Duet go through your Stripe account at the start of the month, list the invoices that are still open and sketch a reminder email for each customer, ready for you to read and send.

• Use Stripe for the detection and the drafting, and send the reminders yourself when the wording matters to the relationship.
• Expect an approval step on payments through Link or Shop Pay, and set aside time to review those requests rather than clicking through them.
• Keep your own record of what was paid, because Duet will not move money between accounts or trade securities.

Before vs After: What Gets Easier

Here is how a few everyday jobs change once Duet is working for you.

What to Watch Out For

The feature is included at no additional cost, but it counts toward your existing plan usage limits, including work done in the background. Anthropic notes that this could make you reach those limits “sooner than with chat alone.” Duet is also not built for personal errands: it is not good at booking tickets, and it cannot show you its browser use as it happens, according to TechCrunch. Anthropic describes it as an early version that still might misread a thread or miscalibrate what is urgent, and it is not available on Team or Enterprise plans yet.

Your Next Steps

• Join the Claude Duet waitlist today, since Anthropic says invitations go out in waves.
• While you wait, tidy the email and calendar accounts you plan to connect, so the first morning brief has clean material to work with.
• List two recurring tasks you would hand over first, such as the monthly invoice chase or the weekly dashboard, and note what a good result looks like.
• Watch for Anthropic’s word on wider availability, including when Duet reaches Team and Enterprise plans.

Related on Gets Hint: Claude Fable 5.1: Anthropic’s Cheaper, Smarter AI Is Here, our Free AI Directory.

Sources: TechCrunch; 9to5Google; The Verge; 9to5Mac.

FAQ: Claude Duet