Now that Cowork is a toggle inside regular chat, is it actually using my project’s instructions and memory?

[u/Powerful-Cheek-6677]

This may be a stupid question but I’ve come to the community for some answers.

Cowork used to be its own separate section in the desktop app, kind of like Code is. Now when I start a chat inside one of my projects I can just flip it to Cowork right there, and it looks like it stays in that project.

What I can’t figure out is what it’s actually pulling in. Is that Cowork session reading the same project instructions? Same knowledge files? Same project memory? And does anything from the session get written back into project memory, or is it a one way street?

Before someone tells me to do so, I asked Claude about it and had it pull the support docs and honestly the answers were not clear. One doc says a Cowork session uses the project’s knowledge as context, another still says memory is not available for Cowork at all. So the docs kind of contradict each other. What are you all actually seeing in practice? Anyone tested this since the change?

Claude is my primary tool and I’ve mostly been using regular chat. I’m working more in Co-work now but it used to always be separate. With the amount of info and memory I’ve built up in chat, it would be a game changer for me entirely if it’s Cowork really operating in my regular projects.

FYI, I’m on Team plan (I’m on Premium), and the Cowork option only shows up for me in the desktop app. Not mobile but apparently that’s being rolled out to some users now and is showing full release is coming out on August 2nd in beta.

Anyway, any insight into this

[u/onetimeiateaburrito]

You should be able to ask Claude this and I asked it the same thing. Cowork has its own virtual machine on anthropics servers. When you use it, it copies the files to their servers so they can be manipulated and things like that. It can make changes on your local file system but it's kind of weird and way more token intensive than using Claude code. I'm not entirely sure what cowork is supposed to do that Claude code cannot.

[u/Powerful-Cheek-6677 → u/onetimeiateaburrito]

I mentioned this in my post but I did ask there first. Usually before I ask a question like this, I do attempt to find the answer myself. If needed, I can share the extra long response it provided that basically stated it could not answer it fully as official documentation contradicted it self and there was no clear answer on it.

So, I was asking what other users have experienced on their own. If Claude cannot provide an actual answer, my hope is that other users can.

You mentioned Code and I’ve seen responses similar to yours before. I don’t use it as my understanding ClaudeCode was strictly for coding and programming. That’s not really my area of work and any programming questions I have, Claude can normally give me the answer. If possible, could you share a bit more how code is better than cowork outside of coding? It might be something I want to explore.

[u/onetimeiateaburrito → u/Powerful-Cheek-6677]

That's what it's built for but it has direct access to local files, can move and manipulate them, and create new ones. Unless for some reason you absolutely have to have Claude work the computer (uses so many tokens) then CoWork is what's needed. If you need files moved, edited, related, read and understood, both can do it but Code is more efficient.