Getting started with Sofos

From download to your first Claude-written document. What each part of the workspace does and the habits worth picking up in week one.

Sofos is a document workspace with Claude built in. Your files sit on the left, the document you're working on sits in the middle, and Claude sits on the right. That's the whole layout. This guide walks through your first session and points out a few things that aren't obvious on day one.

Install and open a workspace

Download Sofos for Mac from sofos.co, drag it into Applications, and open it. The first thing Sofos asks for is a folder. Pick one — or create a new one — for the project you're working on. That folder is your workspace: every document you and Claude write lands there as a real file on your Mac. Nothing lives in a database you can't see.

If you already keep project notes in a folder somewhere, point Sofos at it. Claude can read what's there, which means your first conversation starts with context instead of a blank page.

Your first document

Don't start by writing. Start by telling Claude what you need. Click into the chat on the right and describe the document the way you'd brief a colleague:

• "Draft a one-pager for the Q4 pricing experiment. Audience is the leadership team. Keep it under a page."
• "Read the notes in research/ and pull out the five strongest complaints about onboarding."
• "Turn this into a launch brief" — after pasting a wall of Slack messages into the chat.

Claude writes the document as a markdown file in your workspace and it opens in the editor. From there you edit directly — the editor works like any writing app — or you keep talking: "tighten the intro", "add a risks section", "make the tone less formal". You can also paste screenshots straight into the chat when a picture explains the problem faster than a paragraph.

Three habits worth building early

• Comment instead of rewriting. Select any sentence in a document and leave a comment — "needs a number here", "too vague". Then hit Apply comments and Claude works through your notes like an editor with a marked-up draft.
• Trust version history. Sofos quietly saves versions of each document as you work. The History button in the toolbar shows every version of the open document, and you can restore any of them. Ask Claude for a bold rewrite without fear; the old draft is one click away.
• Keep one workspace per project. Claude reads the whole folder for context. A focused folder gives you focused answers; a junk drawer gives you junk-drawer answers.

Where to go next

Once the basics feel natural, two things make Sofos noticeably more useful: skills, which teach Claude your team's recurring jobs, and app connections, which let Claude work inside tools like Jira, Notion, and Slack on your behalf. Both have their own guides here in the Academy, and the skills library below is the fastest way to see what a well-built skill looks like.