By now, many of you have seen some of the exciting things Anthropic announced recently. I was particularly fascinated with Computer Use. There is already a guide on Github that you can use to set up. You will just have to install Docker for your platform, get your API key from Claude, even if you have a free account, open the command line and run the following. On Windows, you will want to use the “set” command instead of “export.” You also don’t need those %s.
Getting up and running with computer use was pretty easy but I was curious how much it would cost. I loaded my account with $5. Once set up, I went to localhost:8080 and asked Claude to open YouTube and ChessBase on Chrome. I was told that it didn’t have Chrome installed and used Firefox instead. Then I asked it to install Chrome and close any popups as fast as it could to access Gadgetify.com. Here is the entire video that I edited down to a couple of minutes:
In my experiment, it managed to open my other site eventually but the site fails because it just does not work well on older Firefox versions. I simply clicked on Toggle Screen Control option in the right upper corner and reloaded the site. This entire experiment got me down to $3.42.
Is it worth it? It depends. This is currently in beta, so there are challenges. The process was slow, and I did have to rerun it once after it failed to install Chrome. It simply got stuck for a little bit there. You also have to be very specific with your prompt. For example, the AI performed better when I told it to close any popups any way possible. This experiment, which wasn’t complex, cost me $1.58. Not too expensive but I do wonder what the cost would be for a much more challenging task. You can find the documentation here.
