Building an AI Layoffs Tracker with Claude Cowork: Practical Implementation Details

A developer built a live, interactive layoff tracker that scrapes and displays every company citing AI as a reason for job cuts in 2026. The tracker is fully searchable, filterable by industry and year, and includes a hiring board with active AI roles.

How Claude Cowork was used in development

The developer used Claude Cowork (the collaborative workspace) for several specific development tasks:

• Generate initial table structure: Pasted a CSV of layoff data and prompted: "Create an HTML/CSS table with sortable columns, responsive design, and industry/year filters. Use Tailwind CSS." Claude output the entire filter UI and table in one go.
• Debug filter logic: Shared a JavaScript snippet where the "All Years" filter wasn't resetting correctly. Claude identified the issue: "Your renderTable() function isn't resetting the filtered array when year is 'all'. Add a conditional." The fix took 2 minutes.
• Write comparison modal: Requested a pop-up modal to compare 3 laptops side-by-side. Claude wrote the entire modal HTML, CSS positioning, and JS event handlers from a single prompt.
• Optimize mobile touch targets: Asked: "Make the filter drawer accessible on mobile with 48px tap targets and a backdrop." Claude rewrote the CSS and added ARIA attributes.
• Generate mock data: Provided Claude with a list of 5 companies, and it expanded it to 12 with realistic job titles, salaries, and remote/hybrid tags for the hiring board.

The developer noted they couldn't have built this without the 200k context window, which allowed for handling larger code snippets and more complex prompts in a single interaction.