You'll finish with: Folders, instructions and memory mounted.
Setting one up properly takes twenty minutes and decides whether the whole thing is useful.
Four things to set, in order
FoldersThe actual directories it can read and write. Start with one.InstructionsStanding rules for this project. Your CLAUDE.md content goes here.LinksA chat project to draw knowledge from, if you have one.MemoryBuilds up on its own. You don't set this — you just let it run.There are three ways in off that +: Start from scratch (below), Use an existing folder if your client files already live somewhere sensible, and Import from a Claude project if you've already built up a chat project worth carrying over.
Picking a folder is the permission. There is no separate "allow" step — the folder you choose is one Claude can read and write in: open your files, edit them, create new ones, move them around. That's the whole point, and it's the reason the next heading matters.
The temptation is to point it at everything. Don't. A project pointed at one client folder does focused work. A project pointed at your entire home directory spends its time working out where things are.
Projects can also hold their own scheduled tasks — recurring jobs scoped to just this project. Leave that until the last chapter of this course; get the folder and instructions right first.
It lists your actual files and folders back to you. Not a description of what might be there — the real names.
If it can't see anything, the folder didn't attach. Remove it and add it again.