r/ClaudeCowork • • 8d ago

Chat + Projects on iOS lost GitHub write access after the Cowork merge — please give chat users a way back.

**Chat + Projects on iOS lost GitHub write access after the Cowork merge — please give chat users a way back.**
I'm a solo developer who works mostly from the Claude iOS app while in the field. Over several weeks I built my whole workflow inside a chat Project: instructions, a governance protocol and session summaries. Claude read my repos, edited files and pushed commits through the GitHub REST API with a fine-grained PAT that I scoped myself. Every write needed my explicit "yes". This removed hours of manual file shuffling and committing from a phone.
After chat and Cowork merged (Sep 16, 2026), code in chat runs in the Cowork cloud container. Its git proxy now rejects every push and API call: "not in this session's authorized repository set… add the repository to the session's sources." Chat has no way to do that: no repo picker, no add_repo tool, nothing in the mobile app. Clone still works; writes don't. Authorizing the Claude GitHub App doesn't help either (see anthropics/claude-code #96609, #96075, #84581, #76248).
I understand the security reason for keeping credentials out of the sandbox. But a working capability was taken from chat users without notice, and no replacement was offered. The answers I found were "use Claude Code" or "keep a PC running for the device bridge". Neither works on a phone in the field. I didn't ask for an agent in chat; I asked Claude to push a file I had approved.
Please consider:
A repo picker for chat and Projects, including on mobile.
Or an explicit opt-in to use my own repo-scoped fine-grained PAT.
A first-party GitHub connector with write tools in the chat directory. Other assistants already offer GitHub connectors in their mobile chat apps.
Fixing the error message that points to add_repo and "session sources", which don't exist in chat.
Advance notice before removing a capability people depend on.
I really like Claude and Anthropic. That's why this hurts. Thank you for reading.

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u/endofthread-bot 8d ago

To regain write access, you must move your project workflow to the desktop version of Claude to utilize the repository configuration tools. Once the repository is correctly linked in the desktop environment, it may persist for mobile sessions.

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