I don’t even know why I’m writing this one. I just felt like doing it. I really like the Claude ecosystem. I downgraded from the Max tier not because their quality is low but because I really wanted to try the new Cursor Unified subscription. I’m hitting my limits way faster but I love the nice little touches they have been giving to Claude Desktop. Spawning new (sub) sessions is nice. They did it mostly well, at least to catch up.
I was trying Claude Projects for a very simple little thing. I need to give a workshop on Agentic SDLC so the idea is that a Claude Project would help me plan the workshop, build the slides, help me put together the live coding pieces, and that’s basically it.
First thing I was let down was the ability to add a folder to the Claude Project. It complained I have too many files. I don’t even know how that is possible. It’s a folder of work, where I keep slides and a few files. It forced me to pick a sub-set of folders. I don’t want to spend time doing that, when others just handle it for me.
Well, I did it, just to keep going, then I wanted to work out a plan. I spent a session brainstorming defining the high level strategy, but I wanted to have independent sessions taking care of the different sections of the workshop. Claude decided to reuse the same conversation of the plan to execute the work. Why? No idea. That’s not what I wanted to do. I clearly marked the conversation as done, because they have a check box in the UI that I assume means “done”.
Then I said, okay, let’s do it your way. I kept going and going, and Claude decided to keep using the same thread. Why? No idea. I thought the whole purpose of projects was work that spawns multiple sessions. Claude said “forget it, I’ll just do everything here”.
I had to be verbose on how I wanted to do it. I had to be literal and say “for this work, you will do it in a fresh session”. I even cursed a little bit, I don’t know why I spent tokens cursing but it’s my money at the end of the day.
I left Claude working overnight on that project, the slides came back without branding, the files are on a Cloud computer somewhere. I told them to copy them to the folder of my computer that I shared with it, and now it tells me it cannot do it.
Conclusion is that Claude Projects is less useful (useless in my case because I won’t do it again) for knowledge work outside of coding unless you give it a shared drive or a git repo.
Now I’m working on how to get these files out of the Cloud computer so that I can put them in my folder.