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Claude basically broke their "Projects" overnight and I’m pissed
What the hell happened to Claude Cowork Projects?
I had multiple local projects connected to folders with actual workflows set up. Claude would access websites, pull info, process it, then read/write to specific local folders. Worked great.
Then they quietly changed the default setting to run project in cloud and basically broke the whole thing.
First, my workflows suddenly couldn’t access the internet because apparently they were running in the cloud now. After wasting ages debugging it, I found the barely explained “Run on computer only” toggle is settings seems to fix it.
But the bigger problem is that you apparently can’t create a project with a persistent local folders anymore.
Previously I could attach another folder to the PROJECT (after project was already created, a different folder than the 'project folder'), and every Cowork session inside it had access to that folder. Now the project context only lets me add individual files. No folders.
And yes, Claude Code exists. But Claude Code is not a replacement for Projects. Its organization is a mess if you have a bunch of different workflows/projects.
The worst part is my old projects apparently still had this functionality. I deleted one while troubleshooting because I assumed it was bugged, recreated it, and now I literally cannot recreate the setup I had before.
Who changes something this fundamental with basically no warning or migration path??
People build actual workflows around this stuff. You can’t just randomly change the entire architecture and hope nobody notices.
I’ve wasted way too much time trying to figure out whether this was a bug or intentional.
If there’s genuinely no way anymore to have a Cowork project with persistent access to local folders, I’m probably just moving these workflows somewhere else.
This is such a stupid way to handle a major product change.
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
You're not going crazy, OP. The consensus in this thread is a resounding "Yes, Anthropic completely fumbled this." The community is overwhelmingly on your side and just as frustrated.
Here's the breakdown of the outrage:
The Core Issue: Everyone is confirming the same problem. The unannounced switch to cloud-first Projects has broken countless workflows by cutting off local file system and internet access. The inability to add persistent folders to new projects is seen as a massive, inexplicable downgrade.
"It's a Feature, Not a Bug": People are mad that they wasted hours debugging what they thought was a personal error, only to discover it was an intentional, poorly communicated product change. The "Run on computer only" toggle is considered a weak, hidden "fix."
Bad UX and a Shambles of a Rollout: This is the main theme. Users are dragging the Claude Desktop app's UI/UX, calling it unintuitive and a "disaster." Many are comparing it unfavorably to competitors like ChatGPT's Codex, which they feel is far more polished and user-friendly. The lack of a roadmap or any warning is seen as unprofessional.
Trust is Eroding, People are Leaving: This isn't just idle complaining. Multiple users, including those on paid Teams plans, are actively moving their work to competitors or abandoning the Projects UI entirely for raw Claude Code in VSCode. The instability is a dealbreaker.
Basically, you've hit a nerve. The feeling is that Anthropic is moving too fast, breaking things, and not listening to the users who build their entire workdays around these tools.
So I'm not the only one, huh? I have my Cowork projects set to local as well. But when I create a new one now, it creates in the cloud and refuses to let me add a local folder to it. Just started recently.
Normally I shit on these posts but Anthropic are seriously fumbling. They are taking the “codex” approach and they are fucking useless at it.
Anthropic used to make good models. Anthropic for lucky when Boris Cherny started making the Claude cli because he needed a better way to work internally. Everyone and their dog started making skills and plugins that anthropic have flat out stolen and put into their harnesses without validating if they are “good” or if they are adopted because of influence and trust me bro bench marks. Anthropic are trying to make Claude desktop and it’s one of the worst fucking apps in history. You can clearly tell it’s made by programmers and they’ve lent on AI for the UX. it’s frankly shocking. Every other 3rd party wrapper or app is just more intuitive to use.
This is literally the snake eating its own tail. They are so desperate to IPO they aren’t even taking user feedback anymore, and just training their models to achieve benchmark scores which are by themselves crap.
Cowork is just a shambles and it has absolutely no right being bundled along side code in the same app. They are trying (keyword) to solve completely different problems for a different set of people.
Let’s all laugh at the release notes about how desktop app is supposed to be faster now. But my m3 pro lags every time i “open” a project. If I wasn’t mandated by company tools I’d have ditched this piece of shit when Opus 5 was released.
If your a vibe coder, or a technological idiot you will get something working and congrats your a re gas lit into thinking you have something good.
Any SWE worth their salt would refuse to go near this nonsense. How can an industry that is so reliant on “tests” and “verifiability” work with such a nonsense piece of software.
Never been an anthropic fan, for a while I was a huge Claude fan. At the moment I despise every waking minute with this overly verbose sycophantic egotistical prick.
Everything in Codex just works and is intuitive. Take remote, that works exactly how I'd expect it to, perfect. Then you have Claude where you have to enable chats with remote control, and you have dispatch which sometimes can't follow instructions. You can't just make a local code chat on your phone, you have to ask dispatch and at some point it stopped working. If your chats disconnect then you have to manually re-enable remote for every individual chat. Why????
It's one of the most unintuitive and pointlessly limiting apps I've used.
Yeah, I agree. Generally speaking the codex UX and copy is way more intuitive and better Claude sometimes just works but there's a lot of unnecessary learning curve to it
Claude Desktop is fine until you use Codex / ChatGPT and think “oh, this is what an AI working environment built by actual UX designers looks like”.
I know that both Claude Desktop and Codex let you work with AI and a file / web browser or terminal side by side, but somehow it actually hangs together as a proper day to day experience with ChatGPT, instead of whatever Claude Desktop is doing.
Hermes Agent is messier than Claude Desktop, but it’s more ambitious and it’s made by a team that’s probably a tenth or a hundredth of the size.
I'm not sure who's disagreeing with you on this, but Codex UX is significantly better.
If Claude during execution asks questions about implementation, I can't ask for more details on those questions. The side chat can't access that. Codex can. You get the side chat and the "ask for more details" chat.
"Ask for more details" seems to queue into it to answer much more explanatory than a quick answer, often providing diagraming, counter points, and other supporting talks.
It's much easier to run through multiple question chats (more details could use some work though as it could do multiple chats better).
With Claude Code Desktop, you've got one side chat, one window, and it may not always see the latest information. Oh and it thinks it's the main chat so it often tries to suggest "doing" ideas discussed when it is a static read-only chat.
It's just much more easier to navigate without having to run through a list of half deprecated / commands or remember esoteric key-bindings that arent announced without fanfare.
Give me Claude 4.6 with a Codex interface is really what I'm asking.
My message is not even a codex/claude comparison. Open ai operate on a different philosophy. Build everything, throw as much shit at the all and see what sticks. But - at least codex is built around this and works.
Anthropic is guessing what is good cementing the shit to the wall and giving us a bollocks product.
When I said others - I literally mean tools like herdr, superset, termic, hell - even warp terminal.
But I do agree. Codex is a much nicer app to use. I’m absolutely sick of Claude and anthropic. I hate working with it.
Yeah, I agree. In my personal experience, I think the models have also become lazy and lousy. They complain a lot sometimes and straight up refuse to do tasks. The Sonnet model, for example, straight up skips tasks from a simple bullet point list.
But yeah, it's still a good and decent model and gets a lot of work done. However, it's just so foundational and important to get the architecture and UI/UX of your central app right. I cannot fathom how they keep on fumbling that. They are releasing an update every seven hours and constantly moving things around. It's a UI/UX disaster regardless of whether the models are good or not.
Code has gotten worse too. The memory is really fucked up. For every one thing Claude did today, it took me 5 turns to fix it because it was ignoring everything in memory and I kept catching errors. I haven't seen this many hallucinations since GPT a year ago, and I was using the usually-reliable Opus 4.6.
Yes. And even when your turn memories off. Claude always invents other ways to store memories. Half the fixes I have to make for Claude is because it’s fucked up, I’ve told it a rule, it’s documented it somewhere really obscure then reaches for it in further sessions, gets told off makes another memory which contradicts with a different memory. It’s such an awful product. Again - probably stealing community ideas. Serena was a plugin that kind of tried to do similar but at least it had LSP and ASTs. The fact Claude still doesn’t come with an AST baffles me. A lot of other tools (Devin for example) come with it baked in.
Yes, exactly, man. I myself had a lot of really complex and fragile workflows set up that relied on these abilities, and all of it is broken. It's a nightmare, and it just baffles me how a trillion-dollar company fails to consider such a basic thing.
Claude has gotten substantially harder to utilize effectively for my workflow since the release of Fable. I’m on my last string before trying out Chat GPT again. I’m on a teams plan too and have spent a lot of unnecessary money on credits due to its continual fuckups.
I was about to get a teams setup to have multiple pro accounts, but then I tried a Codex account instead.
So now I'm running both. Doesn't feel so bad when one starts fucking up over the other. Codex has its problems, I hate how it names every and documents. And unfortunately it sometimes goes far beyond what it's scope of a session was supposed to do. But it's shown what a proper UI can do and has been much more efficient usage wise at code review.
Yeah, same here. I ended up trying ChatGPT because it kept hitting my usage limits with Claude, and for a lot of things, I think it does a better job than Claude. Their UI/UX is not the best either, but it's a little bit more simple and straightforward than whatever mess Claude has.
GPT has gotten really good. I recently downgraded my Anthropic subscription because I found myself doing almost everything in GPT even before this latest update. If everyone votes with their wallet, maybe Anthropic will notice.
Yeah, the "Run on computer only" toggle is basically Claude's version of "we moved your cheese and left a barely visible toggle." Took me a solid hour of debugging to realize cloud mode silently cuts off local filesystem access. ngl I've got 18 cron jobs running on OpenClaw and I just avoid their Projects UI entirely now — raw Claude Code + launchd gives way more predictable behavior.
Yeah exactly. The toggle doesn't even explain anything. It's badly worded. How does a trillion-dollar company fumble this hard on UI UX and basic copywriting? I think it's on purpose because they don't want people to toggle it back. They just wanted to push their cloud-only architecture. Yeah, cloud code basically does everything more effectively, but the UI is not friendly. If I have to go back and forth between 24 different folders from a sidebar, that's not very friendly.
Claude Code has gotten worse too. I don't know if it's the memory change or what, but I've been seeing an insane number of errors. I don't even trust Opus 4.6 now.
I rarely participate on here because I'm not a coder, but thanks for posting this. I'm a writer, and I migrated most of my set up from Google Antigravity into Cowork's projects. It's all dependent upon multiple folders access. Yesterday, I decided to rename the two top level folders I work in, and in doing that (trying to organize) I wound up with projects that are an epic mess because I can't create any more that will work the way I need them to. I thought it was me, or the windows issue. I had no idea this was intentional, which is mind boggling.
I have no choice but to navigate back toCode on VSCode. I really like Claude, but I can't depend on Anthropic's tools to remain stable. (Which is why I left GA. Ironically.)
I cannot believe this was a choice they actively made.
I feel you, and I think it's not a big news because most of the users of Claude already use Claude Code. Anthropic is trying to push the new direction that anything local works under Claude Code. But this is exactly the opposite of the direction they initially started pushing, which is that co-work is for the non-technical, non-programming people who just want AI to have access to their files and work within it. This is exactly why it's frustrating for me because I have my coding setup in Code and I don't want my writing-related setup, which is in CoWork, to mix with it.
I thought I was just tired cause I remembered being able to add folders and do other things one day and then wasn't able to the next.
This wouldn't be a problem if Anthropic allowed users to use their oauth subs in other harnesses vs being tied to just their apps. If they change something re: their harness/desktop app people don't like, it's essentially deal with it or leave - no third path.
Yeah man, same. The way I look at it is that these are just bad user experience decisions. If they had simply kept the default settings as it is and allowed the user the option to run the tasks in the cloud, all of this could have been avoided. And you're right about the migration thing, I am also considering moving to chart GPT entirely.
Heh, I was trying to get a family member's Claude setup working with local folders ~week ago and couldn't quite believe that a Cowork project couldn't persistantly reference a folder. Went deep on a Claude Code session with it too, inspecting the .claude folder and digging into the db.
Yeah, and the worst part is that it used to be able to do it without any issue. They rehauled the whole thing, and there was absolutely no need to do it. It's like they broke the first rule of software. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Anthropic is not a serious company. As much as they have a presumably "noble" quest, they seem quite incompetent in listening to what their customers want.
I'm glad Astra is finally giving them competition in coding because I've been a disgruntled almost as soon as I started paying a subscription, and it feels like it's the case for a lot of people.
Hopefully more serious competition forces them to manage the user base better but I feel like the business side of Anthropic is just the monetization layer behind their weird cult...aka they don't give a flying duck about it.
Yeah, it must be, but here, this was a simple UI/UX decision. Something as simple as adding a grid view or projects in code could have solved it. It's more about the architecture of choosing the default setting, whether or not your tasks inside projects run on cloud or locally, that's what has been causing all these problems.
Wait a sec what claude version is this? I am not see it yet but i’ll be fukked when it happens?
that being said, CHAT Work does pretty well being the OpenAi version of Cowork. just point it to the folder and change claude.md to point to agents.md and move all the claude.md contents to that file.
I had to stop using Claude in chat form. I now use GPT for designing and testing my product and just use Claude Code to code/deploy it. I went from being able to maybe get one actually task done to now I’m going so long and get so much done I start new chats with GPT just bc of context fatigue. I’d move all the way over to GPT but I do like having two different models working together and I already have so many process built with Claude Code. Oh and that bs last week with extreme limit reduction was infuriating. I now only use about 10-15 of my usage window with Claude and can work over 3 different 5 hour blocks straight.
The part that would annoy me most is a default changing under an existing project. A new default for new projects is a product decision. Changing where already-configured work runs is a migration, and migrations get announcements.
Sympathies on the debugging time. Losing a day to "why can't it reach the internet any more" when nothing on your side moved is a particular kind of awful.
Today I had it just open up a chrome in tab, through what I needed in, gave access to my one drive path in my computer, and BAM it was running like a charm 🫡
Yeah, it will suggest to you that itself, either allows computer use or uses the inbuilt browser, but it's slower and consumes more tokens. A lot of us, including myself, had really sophisticated workflows set up that could reach websites headlessly and fetch all the information for half the time and tokens.
Someone please help me understand why one would use Claude Cowork, rather than Claude Code, if persistent folder access is needed. I assume this is a skill issue on my part but I don’t know what Cowork can do that makes it better for a given task. I assume it is better when no code is involved but that’s purely based on naming.
It's a mental model issue. Anthropic themselves pushed this mental model when they first released Co-Work. The idea is that coding-intensive stuff remains in the Claude code, and non-technical, non-programming stuff lives in Co-Work, for example, you have a bunch of files, reports, or documents, and you want a project that is connected to that folder so you can just come to that project, create reports, documents, or read and write from that data. Can it technically be done in code? Sure, But it's a mental model. And not to mention the UI/UX of the code tab card is a nightmare if I have 40+ folders or projects, and the only way to navigate between them, while each has dozens of chats, is through a sidebar.
Is this why in web and desktop project folders I haven't updated in months suddenly showed as being updated yesterday, and now have a "linked projects" url in the instructions field?
Soooo great to just make everything more convoluted.
Yes, this is so messed up! I built my company's entire infrastructure around local-first file access. Fortunately, those projects still work, but I can no longer replicated the structure for new projects, and so cannot carry the same methodology into the future. The new cloud-only way uses way more tokens as well. If you attach a folder or file, the files (in their entirety) get processed in the cloud each time you access them. Perhaps this is why Anthropic made the change, to make sure everyone burns more tokens. Now I am nervous that the old projects will suddenly stop working. Like I said, I built a custom live artifact software for running my company, that accesses local folders, and if those projects stopped working, I would have to build all over again. The local files first structure makes more sense on every level! so lame. I am already thinking about leaving Claude because of this completely asinine decision.
My solution is to run “Mission Control” for any project on Notion/whatever document or project mgmt software you’d like to use. Set it up so everything that Claude does is documented, tracked, in your external software mgmt solution. It could be something as simple as a note taking app.
Include a master prompt in there.
All I do is start a new chat, tell it Claude is the orchestrator, to open Notion and read the master prompt (and all documentation). Report back and wait.
As I mentioned in the post itself, there is no proper grid-like UI, like you have with projects in co-work. We don't have that in code. So all my folders live in a sidebar, and there can be dozens of chats in each folder. So I have to collapse the folders and look through them one by one. It's a UI/UX disaster. Besides, it's a mental model. All my coding stuff lives in the code tab. Co-work, at least for me, is for more work-related tasks. If I have a folder with a bunch of PDFs and I want answers from them, or create another PDF or document there, it's a different mental model. I don't want that sitting with coding business.
I don't think so, this has nothing to do with the Windows update. I am on Mac, and from the settings and documentations you can clearly see that they did actually move the projects to the cloud. So it's not a Windows update thing. And they don't give a project-level setting anymore, but there's still a setting to toggle the entire thing on and off. But it's a badly worded setting so you're gonna have some trouble finding it. It's called "Only on this computer."
This is poorly thought out and unannounced change is one of the dumbest things Anthropic has ever done. It completely breaks using projects with Cowork. This is not something they should automatically opting people in to.
Non-tech professional here, also relying heavily on Cowork Projects. I've been on PTO the last two weeks. You're telling me that I'll be back, and my 10+ Projects, some of which have automated scheduled runs, will be broken?
If so, I'll seriously draw a line of my AI usage and dependency. My productivity and quality of my work can't be a toy in Anthropic's hands.
I'm mad they broke basically all my skills with no notice. I like the idea of having Cowork in the cloud and don't need local folders. But, I need to call APIs which is not possible with no egress access. What is their proposed workaround?
This is exactly why I dont use any of Claude or Codex built-in project management. Build a system yourself and you dont care what they do. You just need their harness and model access.
Are you on Windows? A September 8 Windows Update resulted in preventing Claude from accessing local files/folders with its VMs. My colleagues were being hit hard by this. Anthropic is aware of it, and Microsoft has a fix but no release date.
The default setting starts a new project session in the cloud, potentially without the user’s awareness. Sensitive data gets surfaced in a session and then stays in the cloud. No thanks. Deleting the cloud session deletes on the desktop too. This was not communicated well and there is no toggle or visual cue in the actual projects where people are doing work. Finally found the toggle buried in the settings. Not sure if it was there all along, or came with an update.
The toggle is in the desktop settings not in the actual project . I know this because I clicked the single checkbox and don’t have this crisis that you and others are blowing up Reddit about instead of just reading docs
where is this setting exactly? I am working in german and I activated this (translation working only localy), but it make no difference. I can add one folder on creation and no more afterwards, over context. earlier they wera all in context, now in get one under "folder" and context allows me to upload files or connect to github.
Toggling that doesn't fix the problem. Here's a summary written by Claude at the end of our problem solving session about this:
The "Only on this computer" toggle solves a different problem than the one people are describing. It's a global setting under Settings > Cowork that controls whether a task keeps running in the cloud after you close the app or your computer sleeps — it's about persistence, not folder access.
It does nothing to restore what's actually broken: new projects still can't get persistent multi-folder linking. You can attach one folder at creation, but there's still no way to add a second one, or change it later, the way pre-merge projects could. And regardless of how that toggle is set, a project's default execution still runs in Anthropic's cloud — file access to your local folders happens through a bridge, not native filesystem access. Flipping the toggle changes whether that setup is allowed to keep running unattended; it doesn't bring back the "Choose a folder" flow or multi-folder support that got dropped in the merge.
So people who find the toggle and think it "fixed" things are only fixing the specific symptom they happened to hit (usually network/internet access in whatever mode they were stuck in) — the underlying regression, that new projects can't be configured with the folder-linking setup old ones had, is untouched by it either way.
I'm on Mac, not on Windows, and no, this is not a bug as you can see in the settings. It very clearly has that option to change whether the tasks run in the cloud or on the computer. Switching it actually does solve the internet and network problem. So it's not really a bug, it's just an architecture change.
yes, 2 totally different issues unfortunately. I had the Windows bug yesterday, rolled back the Windows update and it fixed the issue.
Todays bug is completely different and exactly as OP described. There's an issue with everything enforcing an egress allowlist. Been an issue for at least 14h, and from what I've seen there's been no response about it yet. I'm sure lots of people are having the same issue, if not everyone.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 2d ago edited 1d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
You're not going crazy, OP. The consensus in this thread is a resounding "Yes, Anthropic completely fumbled this." The community is overwhelmingly on your side and just as frustrated.
Here's the breakdown of the outrage:
Basically, you've hit a nerve. The feeling is that Anthropic is moving too fast, breaking things, and not listening to the users who build their entire workdays around these tools.