Working with the new Projects feature in ChatGPT

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Working with the new Projects feature in ChatGPT
If you're working on a large assignment (rather than a single task) you can now create something called a project in ChatGPT to manage it. This blog explains how projects work, and why you might want to create one.

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 April 2025

In this blog

Example 1 - planning a holiday
Example 2 - solving a coding problem
How projects differ from custom GPTs
Conclusions and recommendations

Projects are similar to custom GPTs (I'll look at the differences later on this page): they allow you to create a subset of ChatGPT dedicated to solving a particular problem (or discussing a particular issue) in a particular way:

You can create a new project in an obvious way from the left-hand ChatGPT menu.

Example 1 - planning a holiday

I spend a l-o-n-g time planning holidays, and create multiple chat threads. What I'd like to do is to combine these into a single place, and also set some rules for how ChatGPT should help me. To do this I could create a project (the one below is for a possible trip to Sri Lanka this Christmas):

The start of this exciting new project!

I'll change the colour to the closest I can get to the Sri Lankan flag:

You can choose one of 16 colours for your project, although this doesn't make that much difference, as we'll see in a moment.

I'll start by adding instructions:

Note how the button is now red!

I can now set some base instructions specific to this project. These will override any general instructions I've set for ChatGPT.

In practice you might include a lot more detail in your general project instructions.

I could now also add files (for example, about a flight booking):

You can add files in an obvious way.

You could now start a chat in the normal way:

Starting the project!

One great thing is that you can drop previous chats into your project:

I could search for all chats about Sri Lanka and drag them into my project.

To add a chat to a project, just click on the three dots to the right of it:

Here I'm adding a chat I created previously about hotel and meal costs to my project.

I have to say I'm really impressed by projects, and will use them for any more complicated tasks from now on. The results of the search above were already better than they would have been from a simple question.

Example 2 - solving a coding problem

Being a wordy sort of person, I've often wondered what the longest word that you can build up by adding one letter at each step and allowing anagrams might be. For example, you could begin:

TAN

RANT

TRAIN

STRAIN

STARING

INGRATES

RESTATING

That's as far as I can get for now! I'd like to see if I can solve this by writing a Python program, but when I've tried to do this before using ChatGPT the results have been underwhelming. Perhaps a project will help?

Unlike with a task, it seems easy to add another project in ChatGPT.

The first thing to do is to upload a dictionary of all of the words available in English:

I had previously got a list from this site, but there are probably other better sources.

You often have to wait for your files to upload:

I've uploaded the file, but presumably it's still being read (it was nearly 3 mb, to be fair).

Now I can set the base instructions:

You can see my file is now listed.

Here's what I've said:

This is setting the outline of what the project is to solve, before I start going into the nuts and bolts of the solution.

I'm now going to start seeing if I can create an algorithm for this:

Note that I've asked for pseudo-code (code which is not quite English, but not quite Python either).

ChatGPT clearly doesn't understand what pseudo-code means:

This isn't pseudo-code, but pure Python!

I could now go on to refine this until I had a solution I was happy with, but as proof of concept I think I'll stop here.

The great thing about this project - and the previous one too - is that everything to do with the things I was trying to solve is in a single place, so I can easily go back to each project and add to it in the future.

How projects differ from custom GPTs

If you're an experienced user of ChatGPT you'll now be wondering how projects differ from custom GPTs:

A typical custom GPT (this one allows you to ask for help for any training).

The difference between projects and custom GPTs is audience:

Concept	Audience
Projects	Designed for your use only.
Custom GPTS	Designed for the use of anyone in your organisation (or for the Wise Owl example above, anyone in the world).

Because you know that you'll be the only user of your project (and because it's unlikely to be permanent) you can set up much more specific instructions on how ChatGPT should behave in answering questions about it.

Conclusions and recommendations

Projects are like folders, allowing you to group all of the files, instructions and chats to do with a single application in one place. I will be an enthusiastic user of projects from now on, and recommend that you should be too!

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

Classes in Artificial Intelligence

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Example 1 - planning a holiday

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How projects differ from custom GPTs

Conclusions and recommendations

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