A 📝Project in an AI assistant is a persistent workspace that groups related conversations with shared files and standing instructions, so every chat inside it starts with the same context.
Consumer AI apps including 📝Claude and ChatGPT offer projects as containers for one body of work. A project typically holds a knowledge base of uploaded documents, custom instructions that apply to every conversation, and in some products a separate memory space. Starting a new chat inside the project gives the model that context without re-uploading files or re-explaining goals.
Projects solve the cold-start problem of chat. Without them, each conversation begins empty and the user must restate goals, constraints, and reference material. With them, the setup is done once and reused, which keeps answers consistent across many sessions on the same subject.
The term carries a narrower meaning in agentic coding. 📝Claude Code Projects, redesigned in September 2026, use a coordinator conversation that dispatches parallel worker threads, which is closer to orchestration than to a shared folder. The chat-app sense remains the entry-level concept: a reusable context container for recurring work.