Projects & Goals

Projects

A project is a named workspace linked to a directory on your Mac. Claude Code runs within the project's directory — it can read and modify files there according to the jobs you define.

Create a project from the sidebar: click New Project, give it a name, and select the directory.

Goals

A goal is a high-level objective you want to achieve in a project. Goals contain one or more jobs — scheduled tasks that Claude Code executes to work toward that objective.

Goal statuses:

• active — goal is live; its jobs run on schedule
• paused — goal is temporarily suspended; no new runs start
• archived — goal and all jobs are preserved but inactive

AI-Generated Goals

Describe your goal in plain English and let the AI planner structure it into a concrete job plan. The planner generates 2–6 jobs with suggested prompts, schedules, and rationale.

You review the entire plan before anything runs — approve as-is, edit individual jobs, or start over.

Manual Goals

Skip the AI planner entirely and build your own job list. This is the right choice when you know exactly what you want to automate and don't need the AI to interpret your goal.

Writing Effective Goal Descriptions

The quality of the AI-generated plan depends on the clarity of your description.

Be specific about the outcome, not the steps:

Good: "Run a weekly audit of the /blog section for broken links, outdated content, and
missing meta descriptions. Create a GitHub issue summarising each finding."

Less useful: "Check my website"

Include relevant constraints:

• "Don't touch files in the /vendor directory"
• "Open a PR if changes pass tests; otherwise open an issue"
• "Only report issues; don't automatically fix them"