Claude Projects and ChatGPT Projects Don't Scale to a Team

Your team tried to share AI context the obvious way. Someone set up a Claude Project or a ChatGPT Project, dropped in the docs, and pointed people at it. It half-works. Then it hits a wall, and everyone quietly goes back to pasting context into their own chats.

Projects are good at what they are: one person's context for one focused piece of work. As a team's shared brain, they run into three limits.

Three walls

They live inside one assistant. A Claude Project helps the people on Claude. A ChatGPT Project helps the people on ChatGPT. Whichever you pick, the teammates using the other one are left out, and most teams use both.

They're built around uploads, not a living knowledge base. A Project is a set of instructions and files you attach and then read from. It isn't a shared body of notes your team edits as decisions change, with assistants that read and write back to it. It's a reference drop, and it drifts out of date.

They're scoped to one project. Context in one Project doesn't carry to the next. Your team rebuilds the same background every time it starts something new.

None of this is a knock on Projects. They were built for one person and one focused task, not a team and a growing body of knowledge.

What a team actually needs

One place, outside any single assistant, so it serves the Claude users and the ChatGPT users alike. Writable, so decisions and runbooks stay current instead of frozen at upload time. And readable by every teammate's assistant over MCP.

That's a shared knowledge base with a built-in MCP server, not a folder of files inside one person's Project. Every teammate connects their own AI, and it reads and writes the same notes the rest of the team does. Write a decision down once and every assistant on the team can reach it, in the next session and the one after that.

The full version of this argument is in the team knowledge base for Claude and ChatGPT. The short version: a Project is a person's working context. A team needs a shared, living one.

When Projects are still the right tool

Keep using a Project for what it's good at. A single person, a single deep task, a set of reference files you want that one assistant to focus on. That's the job it does well.

The moment the context needs to be shared, stay current, and serve more than one person's AI, it has outgrown a Project.

Moving your team off Project silos

1. Create a team and a few shared folders for decisions, runbooks, and conventions. The set up your team guide is the quickstart.
2. Move the reference material out of the scattered Projects and into the shared base, once, where the whole team maintains it together.
3. Each teammate connects their own Claude or ChatGPT. A team is free for its first 25 team notes, so you can move everything over before you spend anything.

The point

Projects gave your team a taste of what a working AI context feels like. The problem was never the idea. It was that the context lived in one person's account and couldn't grow.

Give your team a shared one every assistant can read. See Hjarni for teams, or Hjarni for engineering managers for how a team puts it to work.