A Project: rules in the instructions, documents in the knowledge

The marketing team pastes the brand book and the tone rules at the start of every new chat. Sometimes someone forgets, sometimes they paste an old version, and every writer ends up with a different result.

When a team repeats the same thing in every conversation, it belongs in a claude.ai Project, set up once and shared.

Two places, two jobs

A Project has two parts that are best kept apart:

	What goes there	How Claude uses it
Project instructions	Behaviour rules that always apply: audience, tone, format, what to flag, what to do if information is missing	They apply to every chat in the project
Project knowledge	Reference documents: the brand book, the policies, the template contracts, the reports	Claude consults them depending on the question

The difference matters because of how knowledge is read. When the uploaded knowledge grows and approaches the limit of what Claude can read at once, the project automatically switches to RAG mode: instead of reading everything, Claude searches for and retrieves only the parts that look relevant to each question. That lets it handle much more material, but it has a consequence: a rule buried in a file may never be retrieved.

So if a finance team kept its formatting rules in a knowledge file and Claude “sometimes ignores them,” the fix is to move those rules into the instructions and leave only the reference documents in knowledge.

Instructions that give criteria

Project instructions work as system-level instructions: the frame for every answer. Effective instructions state:

• who the output is for (“commercial lawyers reviewing supplier contracts”);
• what format it takes (“a table with clause, risk and recommendation”);
• what must always be flagged (“liability caps, automatic renewal, jurisdiction”);
• what to do when information is missing (“if an annex is missing, say so instead of assuming its content”).

“Be professional and very careful,” in capitals or not, gives no criteria. Nor is it enough to upload a dozen old reviews as knowledge and leave the instructions vague: examples help, but rules that always apply have to be written down.

How to set it up step by step

1. Gather what the team repeats in every chat.
2. Separate rules (they go in instructions) from reference material (it goes in knowledge).
3. Write the instructions with the four points above.
4. Upload only the current version of each document.
5. Share the project with the team (on Team and Enterprise plans), so everyone uses the same setup.

Common traps

• Continuing to paste the brand book in every conversation, even “at the end so it’s read last.”
• Asking each person to save the rules in their personal preferences: everyone ends up with a different version.
• One endless chat for the whole quarter instead of a project.
• Fixing an ignored rule by renaming the file with “IMPORTANT” or splitting it into pieces: it still depends on being retrieved.

On the exam

If the scenario says a team repeats instructions in every chat, look for the option that creates a shared Project with the rules in the instructions and the documents in the knowledge. If it says Claude ignores rules that sit in an uploaded file (clue: lots of material, RAG mode), the answer is to move them into the instructions. And if it asks how to improve vague instructions, choose the one that defines audience, format, what to flag and what to do when information is missing.