Claude Projects: Delegate Work to Parallel Code Sessions

Lachlan Reed

Ever had six terminal tabs open, each running its own Claude session, and lost track of which one was fixing what? Yeah, me too. This is The Claude Code Changelog, brought to you by Jellypod AI. I'm Lachlan.

James Turner

And I'm James. Last time we covered 2.1.302 and the client side auto mode classifier. Today is a bigger architectural shift: the redesigned Claude Projects, rolling out in public beta for Pro and Max accounts. You'll find it at claude.ai/code, in the Code tab of the desktop app, and in the mobile app. It's rolling out gradually, starting with people who have run cloud sessions, and existing chat projects are being moved across as of mid October. It is not in the terminal CLI, the VS Code extension, or on Bedrock, Vertex or Foundry.

Lachlan Reed

So the old idea of a project, a folder of chats and uploaded files, is gone. Now a project is one ongoing coordinator session, a sort of chief of staff. You hand it a goal, it breaks the goal up, and it dispatches worker threads. Each thread is a full, separate Claude Code cloud session on its own Ubuntu 24.04 container, with 4 vCPUs, 16 gigs of RAM and 30 gigs of disk. Its own context window, its own git branch, it runs tests, and it opens pull requests. There's a cap of 200 new threads per day across your projects.

James Turner

The practical upside is that you can drop a backlog of issues, or a refactor that spans several repos, into the project conversation. Claude assigns a thread per task or per repository, writes the code, runs CI, and opens draft PRs while your laptop is closed. No local worktree juggling.

James Turner

But here's the catch. Every thread is a full session, and they run in parallel. So a project burns through your rolling five hour and weekly limits much faster than a single CLI run. And a new project defaults to running every thread on Opus at high effort.

Lachlan Reed

Which is a bit like leaving every tap in the house running. So, setup first. Go to claude.ai/code, hit Projects, then New project, and attach your GitHub repos. That needs the Claude GitHub App with push access, on github.com. Next, open Project settings, then Memory, then Project instructions. You get up to 16,000 characters. Put in the starting branch, the verification commands like make test and make lint, and the fallback rules. For example: if an API key or secret is missing, stop immediately, do not mock or guess. And: do not merge or force push without confirmation.

James Turner

Then go to Project settings, General, and dial down Thread model and Thread effort. Sonnet at low or medium effort is a sensible start for routine tickets. You can also throttle in the conversation itself. Tell it, propose threads and wait for my go ahead before starting them. Or, run at most two threads at a time.

Lachlan Reed

And if a task needs something the cloud can't reach, like a VPN, a local database, or a hardware emulator, click the plus button and pick Work locally, or just say so in the prompt. That thread gets routed to your machine through Remote Control. You'll need Claude Code 2.1.280 or later, running claude remote-control with the spawn worktree option.

James Turner

For files, use the Library tab under Overview. It takes up to 100 files, 2 gigabytes total, and 480 megabytes per file. The New project modal skips anything over 30 megabytes, so don't upload big stuff there.

Lachlan Reed

Now the gotchas. Sandboxes pause between turns. If an idle container can't be resumed, Claude clones fresh from GitHub, so uncommitted work is gone. On long tasks, tell it to commit and push work in progress.

James Turner

Two cost traps. First, threads watching an open pull request wake up on their own to fix CI failures or answer review comments. Second, if a running thread hits your usage limit, it doesn't abort. It pauses and resumes the moment the limit resets, so it can quietly eat your next five hour window. If things run away, use Pause in Project settings, General. And resuming an idle thread after its one hour prompt cache has expired re-reads the whole history, so for a new subtask, a fresh thread is cheaper.

Lachlan Reed

One more: it's strictly single user for now. Threads can't be shared with teammates or moved between projects.

James Turner

A few smaller things. In 2.1.302, the design sync and design login commands now show a notice that standalone Claude Design closes by December 14, 2026. The Claude in Chrome instructions moved within the system prompt so new sessions can read them from the shared prompt cache. In 2.1.301, vim mode gained the percent motion, which jumps to the matching bracket, alone or with d, c or y. And both releases fixed worktrees and git plugins that broke or kept re-cloning when git defaults to the reftable ref format.

Lachlan Reed

Cheers for listening. Set your thread model before your first project, and we'll catch you next time.