Wish I could ask Cowork about itself without it actually doing anything

Sharing this one to see if it lands for others using Cowork for governance, design, or any kind of multi-step work.

I've started running Cowork sessions for things like Purview labeling design, Entra cleanup planning, and DLP policy scoping. The output is useful, but honestly the most valuable thing in those sessions is the path — what got considered, what got rejected, what trade-offs surfaced. Days or weeks later I want to come back and ask "why did we land here?" without Cowork picking the session back up and changing things.

What I'd love to see is a read-only side Chat against a Cowork session. Full read access to the transcript, files, decisions, and artifacts — but zero write or action permissions. Just Q&A.

There's also a credit angle that matters to me. If I'm just asking follow-up questions about what was already built, that's a research/read task — I don't want to spend Cowork session credits on it. Today I work around it by launching a regular Chat and pointing it at whatever documentation or artifacts I exported out of the Cowork session. It works, but the Chat doesn't have the full context — it only sees what I exported, not the actual session transcript, intermediate steps, or the paths Cowork considered and rejected. A built-in read-only Chat against the session itself would give me Chat-level efficiency with full Cowork context.

The use cases for IT infrastructure architecture and governance work line up cleanly:

• Research follow-ups ("why X over Y?")
• Decision review ("what trade-offs were discussed?")
• Handoff and onboarding ("walk me through what was done")
• Audit and governance ("explain this outcome to a stakeholder")

Cowork would essentially become a durable, queryable record of how complex work was done — not just what came out the other end. For anyone treating Cowork as a system of record for design and decisions, that's a big unlock.

Is anyone else thinking about Cowork this way? And for those who have hit this — how are you handling the "explain what Cowork did" problem today?

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/2e7b6245-fa6c-f111-9b47-6045bdbd0989