I have been using Claude recently and was messing with their projects. The idea is nice: you give it overall instructions, add relevant documents, then you start chats with that context always present. Or at least that’s what is promised. In reality it immediately forgets the project instructions. I tried a simple one where I run some writing samples through it and ask it to rewrite them with the project description being that I want help getting my writing onto social media platforms. It latched onto the marketing immediately. But one specific instruction I gave it was to never use dashes, preferring commas and semicolons when appropriate. It did that for the first two samples I had it rewrite but after that it forgot.

Another one I tried is when I had it helping me with some Python code. I told it to never leave trailing whitespace and prefer single quotes to doubles. It forgot that after like one or two prompts. And after reminding it, it forgot again.

I don’t know much about the internals but it seems to me that it could be useful to be able to give certain instructions more priority than others in some way.