Project Chat
In this third installment of my five-part series on working with Claude, I want to talk about Project Chat. Like you, I started out with ChatGPT. It was powerful and fun and I found it both fascinating (and a little creepy) when I gave it the prompt.
What do you know about me?
And it came back with a lot of content. I also started to notice that ChatGPT was building an impression of me across all of my chats. When they introduced the custom GPT’s, that felt like creating a stand alone agent, one with a “fixed” persona. A Custom GPT feels like a standing prompt. I don’t have to keep pasting the same prompt text over and over again. With a custom GPT, I can have many chats with the same “personality” plus I can add resources files the persona can use to help shape it’s answers.
My favorite use for a GPT? To create a persona that could coach me on a topic, or one I could query to get a different perspective on a problem.
True Story
There are jobs in my company I will never want to have because of my personality. I would get bored. But there are people who love those jobs. I of course, do not understand those people. But I love them. If I’m going to hire more people, like my top performers, it helps to have a GPT that looks at the job position from their perspective.
Simple example: Every owner in our GameTruck system calls their employees “drivers” (because they drive the game trailer to the party.) Exactly 0.0% of their employees think of themselves as drivers. I know. I’ve asked. We’ve interviewed them. It’s not the word they use to describe themselves. They think of themselves as video game coaches, or party hosts, or event planners, but not drivers.
That self image matters for a couple of reasons. If you run an add looking for professional drivers, you’re going to get peole who think the job is about driving, not entertaining kids at a birthday party. But much more importantly, there is a concept called - Psychological reactance. It is a fancy term for the negative emotions people experience when they feel like their identity is being defined for them. In layman’s terms, it’s the feeling you get when you want to shout, “Don’t tell me who I am!”
I found creating a GPT that helps me see from someone else’s perspective was like practical empathy. I could enter conversations primed to understand the person better. Do I take the robots words as gospel? Absolutely not! But, the CustomGPT can help my perspective seeking enormously, and I find that worth it. Give it a try and see how it feels to you. While I love CustomGPT’s, I also realize Claude does something different. It uses Projects.novis
Claude’s a little different
When I moved over to Claude, at first I missed my GPT’s, but then I saw how they used projects and I found them to be even more powerful for one specific reason. But before I go into that, let me give you the overview.
How Projects are like GPT’s
- You can give them an initial prompt. A standing role to play and persona.
- You can give them files and resources to work with.
So far, they seem the same.
How Projects are different
- Projects have their own memory space
- Projects organize all the chats with that project into one folder.
Those last two lines are a big deal. For me, creating a project was the beginning of me thinking about the AI as a “digital employee.” Why? Because I could create a persona, give it resources, and then every interaction I had with that persona was contained in one space.
Memory Spaces
In the world of programming, the way information is shared has a special name, it is called scope. I don’t want to overwhelm you but think of it this way. You have company wide resources that anyone can access (like the HR department). This is like your global or application scope. You have department resources, that anyone in your department can use. For example think of a department printer, or kitchen. These are file/module level resources. And then you have resources at your desk, like your stapler, computer. Think of these as function or object level resources. There can be many desks in a department, and a few departments in a company.
ChatGPT tends to operate at a very high level of sharing. Every conversation happens at the company level. Memory is shared across all chats.
Claude in contrast, tends to be more structured. There is a global chat, but even it happens in sort of a Headquarters department. Every chat, at the top level is visible to every other chat. However, when you make a project, you have created a kind of department. And only chats, within that department can access the other chats in that department. The files, and initial prompt become like the department level resources.
So if you use the company, department, desk metaphor - you can see that: a file you attach to a single chat becomes like a file you set on someone’s desk. It is only accessible at that desk (in that chat).
But if you create a project and add a file to that project, then that file becomes available to every chat in that department. They can all access it.
Unlike ChatGPT, Claude doesn’t really have a global “here’s a file for everyone” mode. That’s not to say you can’t make files globally available if you want to, but you would have to do some work to make that happen. It’s not the default setting.
The Power of Compartmentalization
I love projects for several reasons.
First, it matches how I work with PARA. I tend to create project folders for everything I do and I put everything related to a project in that folder. One of the worst teachings of all time came from the computer industry and it was totally unquestioned. They told you to store your information by type. That is a horrible way to work with information. In the real world we store tools by how we work with them, by the job to do. We don’t store them by who made them. The software industry would have you put your toothbrush, your hairbrush, and your toilet brush in the same place because they are “brushes”.
Project folders let you combine resources and how you think about them and how you use them in one container, like a kitchen, or a workbench, or your desk at work.
Second, because they do not share memory (they have a different scope), you can have radically different tones, personalities and conversations without them contaminating each other. Think of it this way. Let’s say you ran a PR firm who was agnostic as far as party affiliation, and you had a conservative client from Texas, and a liberal client from New Hampshire. You would very likely want to make sure that their information was separated, like with a fifty foot wall five feet thick.
Projects let you create this kind of separation.
Here is a real world application of how I use projects.
Example
- I have a project folder for my GameTruck Franchisees.
- I have a project folder for the Corporate owned GameTruck stores.
That might not sound like a lot, but it matters. Franchisees are business owners and I work with them like partners, suggesting, helping, cajoling, but in general I never tell them what to do.
The people who run our corporate stores are employees and they are expecting me to give them direction.
The differences go deeper than that. The individual franchisees have their own pricing, their own cancelation polices, and a million different details about their business. The GameTruck corporate stores have standardized operating procedures.
Projects help me keep all of that straight so not only my facts and figures stay correct, but also my tone and approach.
My employees want to know what I think they should do. My franchise owners want me to share my thinking but not tell them what to do.
Projects make it easy for me to do that.
Summary
So to make it clear, a project in Claude lets you set an initial prompt that will be used for all the chats in that project, and, like department level resources you can add files for reference to a project that will also be available for every chat. Projects have their own “scope” or memory space. They can’t access other projects resources, and as far as I am aware, they can’t access the top level (HQ) chats. I see this as a good thing.
Try It Yourself
As always, ask Claude:
Help me understand projects. What are they and how do they work? Can you give me an example to try out?
Until next time.
Scott