Projects

Projects are a way to organize your chats and give them shared context. A project groups related conversations together for a client, a system, an initiative, or any body of work and lets you define background information and instructions that are automatically applied to every chat in that project.

Where Collections scope the knowledge a chat can draw on, a project scopes the context a chat starts with. The two work together: a chat can belong to a project and still pull from collections.

Finding Your Projects

Click Chats & Projects in the sidebar. This opens a tabbed view with two tabs:

• Chats — your recent conversations.
• Projects — all of your projects. Each project is an expandable row that reveals the conversations inside it.

Creating a Project

1. Open the Projects tab and click New.
2. Enter a Project name (required).
3. Click Create.

The project is created right away and appears in your list. You can add its context at any time afterward.

Project Context

The most useful part of a project is its Project Context — optional background, goals, or instructions that are automatically included in every chat you start within the project. Select a project in the Projects tab to open its detail panel, where you can edit:

• Name — required.
• Project Context — optional. Described in the app as "used to pass additional context for each chat in the project." Use it for standing information you would otherwise re-type in every conversation: the client and system you are working on, relevant standards, tone and formatting preferences, or constraints to keep in mind.

Click Save to apply your changes. Project Context can be up to 16,000 characters.

Because this context is applied to every chat in the project, you set it once and every new conversation in that project starts already knowing it — no need to repeat yourself.

Default Agent and Collections

Alongside its context, a project can carry defaults that are applied whenever you start a new chat from it:

• Default agent — the agent or model that new chats in the project begin with, instead of your usual default. Useful when a body of work is best handled by a particular agent's expertise or tone.
• Default collections — the collections (or specific documents) that are pre-selected as knowledge sources for new chats in the project. Useful when the same reference material is relevant to every conversation in the project.

Set these in the project's detail panel, the same place you edit the name and Project Context, and click Save.

Both are defaults, not restrictions. In any individual chat you can switch to a different agent using the dropdown near the input field, and add or remove collections using the folder button — see Chat Features for both. Changing them in a chat affects only that conversation; the project's defaults stay as they are.

note

Changing a project's defaults applies to chats you start afterward. Conversations that already exist keep the agent and collections they were started with.

Starting a Chat in a Project

There are two ways to open a chat that belongs to a project:

• From the project — expand the project's row in the Projects tab and start a new chat from there.
• From the input box — in a new chat, click the Pick a project for this chat button in the input toolbar. A picker opens listing your projects (and a No project option). Choose one and click Use project. A dot indicator shows that a project is selected. When you send your first message, the chat is created inside that project.

Once the conversation belongs to a project, it inherits that project's context, starts with the project's default agent and collections if they are set, and appears grouped under the project in your Projects tab.

Moving an Existing Chat into a Project

You choose a project when a chat begins. To move an existing conversation into a project (or to a different one) later, open the chat's menu (the ellipsis) in the sidebar and select Move to project.

Managing Projects

Open the menu (the ellipsis) on any project row for these actions:

• Edit — change the project's name, Project Context, default agent, or default collections.
• Pin / Unpin — pin a project to the top of your list for quick access; unpin to return it to the normal order.
• Delete — remove the project.

warning

Deleting a project also deletes all of the conversations inside it. The app asks you to confirm — "Delete project ... and all of its conversations? This cannot be undone." — because this cannot be reversed. If you want to keep a conversation, move it out of the project first.

Projects vs. Collections

Projects and collections solve different problems and are often used together:

• Projects organize your chats and apply shared context and instructions to them.
• Collections organize your documents so Clove can search and cite them as a knowledge source.

For example, a project for a particular client might hold every conversation about that engagement and carry the engagement's background as its context, while a collection holds that client's reference documents. Setting that collection as one of the project's default collections connects the two, so every chat in the project can search those documents without you selecting them each time. See Collections for more.

Tips

• Put standing instructions in Project Context. Anything you find yourself re-typing at the start of chats — the system, the audience, the format you want — belongs in the project's context.
• Set defaults for the setup you repeat. If you pick the same agent or reach for the same collections at the start of every chat in a project, make them the project's defaults instead.
• One project per body of work. Grouping conversations by client, system, or initiative keeps your history navigable and your context relevant.
• Pin what's active. Pin the projects you are working in right now so they stay at the top.