claudio has been having a great time latelyand it’s not just exaggeration. It is truly one of the most useful AI tools I have come across. It stopped being just a tool that I open from time to time a long time ago; Now I practically live in it. That’s when I need ideas for the novel I’m crafting, references for design projects, random research that I really need to retain, literally everything I’d normally spend four times as much time Googling or procrastinating on. It became my default first stop for a variety of strange things.
Projects are a big reason. It’s the feature that allows Claude to remember things between conversations (his context, documents, all his settings) so he doesn’t have to explain himself again every time he opens a chat. And once I set it up, a lot of the other things I used to manage separately start to feel like extra work for no reason. Projects isn’t exactly a hidden gembut for something that does so much heavy lifting, it’s surprisingly little talked about.
What Claude’s Projects feature actually is
It’s not just a folder for your chats
The short version: Every normal Claude chat starts completely new: he doesn’t know what you’re working on, what you’ve already covered, or anything about you. Projects change that. They are a persistent workspace where your custom instructions and uploaded documents carry over to every conversation within that project, so Claude already has the context before he’s written anything.
What you are working with within a Project is three things. Personalized instructions, which is where most of the real value is. Here it gives you context about what the project is, what you’re trying to do, and how you want the answers to be structured. There is a knowledge base where you can upload PDF files, Word documents, CSV, plain text and images (up to 30 MB per file) and can be consulted in each chat.
Free users get five projects, which is really usable. Paid plans open up unlimited projects and better RAG management as the knowledge base grows; basically a smarter recovery when it has been loaded heavily. The free limit of five projects will be enough for some people and could immediately be limiting for others.
Setting one up correctly takes about ten minutes, but it’s easy to skip the important parts. Name it specifically. Write real instructions that include the real context: what is this project, what are you working on, how do you want it to respond, what to look out for, what to avoid, etc. Seed the knowledge base before you start chatting, but it’s also worth revisiting it throughout the project to iterate or expand.
How Projects Replaced Half the Clutter You Used to Manage
Notes I forgot, bookmarks I never opened, and “later” tabs
My notes situation was bad in one specific way: I would enthusiastically create them, but then forget where I put them due to using multiple note-taking tools, or that they even existed. Half of them were ideas I captured in the moment and never went back to, which kind of defeats the purpose. The more notes I accumulated, the less I was confident that any of them were actually useful.
That Superseded projects It wasn’t the notes themselves, it was the habit that created them. Now, when I have a half-formed idea or question about, say, the novel I’m working on, I open that project and discuss it in conversation. The thought happens there instead of in a note that won’t make sense in a week. The conversation is the note and has context around it, so it can be read later.
The markers followed the same path. I have hundreds, maybe more, most of them from a version of me that was very optimistic about how much reading they were going to do later. Everything really useful now goes to the project’s knowledge base: either the entire content pasted as text or the URL as a web link reference. Now it’s there when I need it, but I don’t have to take the deliberate action of searching and opening the page every time.
Pinned and open browser tabs are basically the same problem as bookmarks, just more visible. Each one is something that seemed too important to close. The habit change was quite simple: whatever I had opened a new tab to “remember”, I put it in the corresponding Project. So now, every time I get, say, inspiration for a design, it all goes into my weekly design project all at once. The next time I want to tackle the design project, I don’t have to worry about missing references.
A simple trick I use is to take screenshots. Either a note or a design inspiration, and add it as a reference file to my Project. Claude can read and interpret all images, so he’ll be able to see exactly what you’re working with, and screenshots are also much faster than manually copying and pasting.
What the projects won’t do
Honest Warnings Before Getting Rid of All Your Other Tools
Projects is not a notes app, and if your system is built around something like Obsidian with backlinks and a knowledge graph, it won’t replace it. There is no full-text search in conversations or network notes. The knowledge base is also a snapshot, not a live stream. Everything you upload is static – if the document changes, you’ll need to manually upload it again.
It’s also worth knowing the context limits, especially on the free tier. If you load the knowledge base a lot, you can reach the maximum token limit faster. Paid users get automatic RAG handling when it fills, which basically means smarter recovery as the Project grows. Free users can manage it by periodically exchanging older or less relevant documents.
The five project limit in the free tier is the other. It feels good at first, but if you’re running a few active things at once, you’ll get there faster than expected and have to make some decisions about what’s left. Finally, it’s worth noting that while you can add web links in the text field as references, Claude does not index the page during setup. When chatting, you’ll try the URL directly, fail or succeed, and either way you usually seem to end up getting the correct content via search.
just try it
Projects is one of those features that it’s hard to explain why it’s good until you’ve set one up properly and lived in it for a couple of weeks. The value is not obvious from the outside. But if you’re someone who loses things in their own notes or has a bookmarks folder that causes more anxiety than organization, it’s worth setting up a project, loading it properly, and seeing how different a conversation feels when Claude already knows what you’re doing.
- SW
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Windows, Mac OS
- Individual prices
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Free plan available; $17/month Pro Plan
- Group prices
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$100/month per person for Max plan
