> The agent is more focused on coding than cowork / work

I suspect this difference is pretty minimal. Before Cowork launched I was using Claude Code in the way that I use Cowork now and getting pretty much the same results albeit without the sandboxing (which is more of a hassle than not, TBH). OpenAI says in their announcement that the same is true for Codex, which doesn't surprise me at all.

These agentic loops are pretty applicable to all kinds of tasks, not just coding, and people started realizing this pretty quickly upon their introduction / creation.

Cowork is just Claude Code + tools to read Microsoft Office files