Claude Code's new projects feature acts like a chief of staff: Here’s what it does

A software engineer juggling a login bug, a payment system update, and a batch of new tests used to mean three separate conversations with Claude and three separate rounds of explaining the same project background. That friction is gone.

Anthropic redesigned projects inside Claude Code this week, letting developers hand off multiple related tasks within one ongoing workspace instead of starting fresh each time.

Previously, developers working on a large codebase had to manually re-brief Claude in every new conversation to avoid conflicting changes. The updated Projects feature keeps that context live across tasks, so Claude tracks how one assignment affects another and adjusts its work as the project shifts.

Anthropic is positioning the tool less as a single-request chatbot and more as a coordinator across a whole workstream, what the company is calling a coding "chief of staff".

Small teams of engineers have already been relying heavily on AI to deliver much more than they can. In March 2025, the CEO of Y Combinator, Garry Tan, announced that about 95% of the code was created by AI in about a quarter of the winter batch of the accelerator, enabling some 10-member teams to compete with the productivity of 50-100 engineers.

A system that ensures consistency in the internally created content is particularly important for small teams who have no excess resources to fix inconsistencies manually.

Speed hasn't solved everything. A 2026 survey of more than 1,100 developers by an AI coding startup Sonar found that while AI produced 42 per cent of their code, 96 per cent didn't fully trust the output, and 38 per cent said reviewing AI-written code took longer than reviewing a colleague's.

Connecting related tasks inside one project won't eliminate errors, but it narrows one specific failure mode: Claude making a change in one task that quietly breaks another.

Claude Code is competing in a crowded field that includes OpenAI's Codex, Amazon's Kiro, Cognition's Devin, and vibe-coding platforms like Replit and Lovable.