How to organize AI chats into projects on your Mac
- A project is a durable container: files, context and chats that belong to one piece of work.
- It means not pasting the same background into every new conversation.
- Point a project at a codebase and the AI can find the relevant file instead of guessing.
- Everything stays on your machine — a project is local state, not a cloud workspace.
The hidden tax on chat assistants is re-explanation. Every new conversation starts from nothing, so you paste the same context again, and the quality of the answer depends on how much of it you remembered to include.
What a project changes
Instead of context living in your head and being re-typed, it lives with the work. Open a chat inside a project and the assistant already has the background: the files, the constraints, the prior decisions.
For code the difference is sharper still. With a codebase attached, the assistant can locate the function you're describing rather than asking you to paste it — which is the difference between a colleague who has seen the repo and one who has not.
Setting one up
- Create a project for a real unit of work, not a topic.
- Attach the files or codebase that define it.
- Add standing context — the conventions and constraints you'd otherwise repeat.
- Chat inside it, and stop re-explaining.
Getting more out of it
- Narrow beats broad. A project scoped to one codebase outperforms one scoped to "work".
- Write the constraints down. The things you'd tell a new teammate are exactly what belongs in standing context.
- Projects and memory are different. Memory is what the AI knows about you across everything; a project is what it knows about this work.
Common questions
What is an AI project folder?
A container that holds files, standing context and the chats for one piece of work, so every conversation starts with the background already loaded.
Can a local AI read my whole codebase?
It indexes the codebase you attach so it can retrieve the relevant parts on demand. Everything stays on disk.
How is a project different from memory?
Memory is cross-cutting knowledge about you. A project is scoped context about one body of work. They complement each other.
Is project context uploaded anywhere?
No. Projects are local state on your Mac.
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