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The Gaia harness is accessible via a remote MCP server, which is what Claude calls a custom connector. Add it once and it appears everywhere you use Claude — chat on the web, Cowork, Desktop, and mobile. This is the surface that needs no terminal at all. An operator with a spreadsheet can build the app themselves, in the same chat where they’d have asked someone else to do it.
Claude connects to the connector from Anthropic’s cloud, not from your device — so there is nothing to install locally and nothing to keep running. It works the same on mobile as on desktop.

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Add the connector

1

Open your connector settings

In Claude, go to Settings → Connectors (some versions label this Customize → Connectors).
2

Add a custom connector

Click Add custom connector (on some versions: + → Add custom connector), then enter:
Leave Advanced settings alone — the connector registers itself, so you don’t need to supply an OAuth client ID or secret.
3

Connect and sign in

Click Add, then Connect. Your browser opens the Gainable sign-in, you pick which account to connect, and you’re done.
The consent screen has a checkbox — “Also let it write code in your apps.” Leave it off unless you want author mode.

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Turn it on in a conversation

Adding a connector doesn’t switch it on everywhere. In any chat or Cowork session, use the + button in the message box → Connectors, and toggle Gainable (Gaia) on. Then check it:
Your apps listed back means everything is connected.

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Build something

Attach a spreadsheet to the message and ask:
Claude imports the workbook, asks you a handful of questions about your own data — which sheet is reference material, whether a “TOTAL” row is a summary to drop — then walks the contract conversation and runs the build. Give it 90–180 seconds at the end and paste-ready URLs come back.
No spreadsheet handy? Download the event planning sample and attach that.
From there it’s ordinary conversation:

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Cowork specifics

Cowork uses the same account-level connector list as Claude chat, so if you added it above there is nothing more to add. Two things behave differently, and both are worth knowing.

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Name the app you mean

Cowork re-establishes its connection before each tool call, so the connector can’t tell one Cowork conversation from another on the same account. Rather than guess — and risk editing a different app you have open elsewhere — it refuses to assume and asks which app you mean. In practice that means the first request in a session should name the app:
Once Claude has the app’s projectId from apps_list or from creating it, it carries it forward for the rest of the conversation. Claude Code doesn’t hit this because a folder’s .gaia/project.json answers the question for it.
This is a guard, not a limitation. The “currently active” app is remembered per account, so on a connection the server can’t isolate, a remembered app is as likely to belong to another session as to yours — and building into the wrong app looks exactly like success until much later.

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Give it your context

A Gainable app is shaped by things the connector cannot know: what you call things, your currency and date format, who uses the app, what must never appear on a list view. Ask Claude to set up the project and it returns a starter you can use either way:
  • A Cowork project with a folder — it writes a README.md, a CLAUDE.md for your domain context, and data/ and apps/ folders.
  • A chat-only project — there is nowhere to write files, so it shows you a block to paste into the project’s Instructions (or the “What are you trying to achieve?” box when you create one). That box is the only place project-level context survives without a folder.
Either way the template is placeholders in angle brackets — fill them in, or it does nothing.

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If a file upload fails

Cowork sandboxes can have network egress switched off, which blocks the direct upload path for spreadsheets. Claude will fall back to sending the file in slices, which works but costs context. To use the fast path, an admin can enable Settings → Capabilities → Code execution → Allow network egress.
If Claude offers to trim, split, or convert a spreadsheet “so it fits” — say no. The analyzer reads the real workbook, including section-divider rows, banded sheets, and reference tabs, to decide the schema. A slimmed file doesn’t import a smaller app; it imports a different and wrong one.

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How it compares to Claude Code

Same connector, same tools, same harness. What differs is what the client can see:
Both surfaces edit the same app. An operator can iterate in Cowork while an engineer works from the terminal, so handing off no longer means handing over.

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Manage the connection

  • Change or revoke it in Claude — Settings → Connectors, then the three-dot menu.
  • Change or revoke it in Gainable — Account → Connections. This is also where you turn author mode on or off without reconnecting.

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Next steps

Tool reference

Every tool the connector exposes.

Claude Code

The same connector, from your terminal.