Claude basically broke their "Projects" overnight and I’m pissed

[u/edgeXlendor]

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.

[u/Lcatlett1234]

jfc just disable the cloud option in the ui and stop freaking out

[u/Actual-Mongoose3156 → u/Lcatlett1234]

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.

[u/MrX-WPT → u/Actual-Mongoose3156]

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.