Anthropic quietly folded the Cowork tab into "Projects" today. No changelog, no warning, and it cost me an entire afternoon

I run a publishing business through Claude's Cowork feature. Not casually. Genuinely built out, folder by folder. Eleven project folders, all with fully developed prompt scripts. Weeks of setup. Custom instructions in each one, tuned so Claude knew who I was and what I needed done.

This morning the Cowork tab is gone. Replaced by a "Code" tab. No changelog notice, no email, no in-app heads-up. Just gone.

For a good chunk of my day I thought I'd lost all of it! Every project, every instruction set, weeks of work, vanished without so much as a "hey, we're changing this."

Here's what actually happened, once I dug through support docs and pieced it together myself: Anthropic merged Chat and Cowork into a single interface today. The Cowork tab wasn't deleted, it got folded into the regular Projects screen. (The same one that lived outside Cowork.)

So now my business projects sit in the same undifferentiated grid as my "Watercolor Painting Mentor" hobby project, distinguishable only by a tiny laptop icon that's explained nowhere. Now, instead of eleven business Cowork folders, I have twenty-seven, including personal project folders, all lumped together in one interface.

I get why Anthropic might have done this. The old Cowork folders had a real, documented flaw I dealt with every day: a new chat session in a Cowork folder wouldn't reliably load my identity or instruction files unless I re-pointed it every single time. Genuinely painful, and worth fixing. After some research, I see that Anthropic's own docs frame the new unified Projects setup as the fix for exactly that problem.

Fine. Fix the architecture. But this is a tool people run actual businesses through, and the entire information architecture of it changed with zero warning. I spent hours confirming nothing had been deleted, cross-referencing two different local file paths Cowork had apparently been writing to without telling me, before finding my work projects sitting in a projects tab outside of Cowork. Gee, I would have been nice to just tell me to look there. Instead, I spent time looking through the "folder" section inside the chat window!

If you're going to let people build real workflows on your product, tell them before you move the furniture. One release note would have saved me an afternoon and a genuine scare.

P.S. I get Rule 4, but that Megathread is impossible to understand. Plus, this is NOT A BUG report.