Projects: context that stays

A project is a workspace for one job that keeps its own files, its own instructions and its own memory.

Anthropic puts it in a way worth holding on to: projects group related tasks into dedicated workspaces with their own files, context, instructions and memory. Everything in this course that is specific to the sales report belongs in one.

What goes in it

• Instructions for this job: what clean means here, what the summary must contain, who reads it.
• Files and context: the folder of exports, a link to related work, a reference page.
• Scheduled tasks that belong to this job rather than to your account generally.
• Memory: what Claude learned doing this job last time.

The part that changes how you work

Memory is enabled for Cowork projects, which means Claude can remember context from tasks you have run in a project and apply it to later ones. Correct the region spellings once inside the project and the correction is available next month, without being part of the brief.

That is why the brief in lesson 2 gets shorter as the course goes on rather than longer. The details move into the project and stop being typed.

Two limits worth knowing

Projects are a Cowork feature and are not available in Claude Code. And a project created from a local folder stays on that computer rather than being saved to your account, which matters the first time you open Cowork on a different machine and find it missing.