[BUG][Claude Desktop] Sort by: Recency has no effect when Group by: Project

Would be great to have this fixed, I makes life so much easier when working with multiple projects at a time.

+1 on this — seeing the same on Claude Desktop 1.5354.0 / macOS. One narrowing that may help triage: with Group by: Project selected, sessions within each project group do reorder by Recency — it's only the project groups themselves that stay alphabetically sorted regardless of the Sort by setting. So the symptom is specifically "Sort by has no effect on group-level ordering," not on session-level ordering. This overlaps with #55225, which asks for project groups to sort by most-recent activity.

+1 from Windows — though the Windows behavior is narrower than the OP's macOS repro, which seems worth flagging for triage.

Environment

• Claude for Windows 1.7196.0 (2dbd78)
• Windows 11 Pro (10.0.26200)

Behavior on Windows

• Group by → Project: Sort by → Recency works. Project group headings reorder by recency as expected. (Possibly diverges from the macOS behavior in the OP.)
• Group by → Custom Group: Sort by → Recency only takes effect for the Ungrouped bucket. Conversations inside named Custom Groups don't reorder when I flip Alphabetically → Recency.

So on Windows the bug appears scoped to user-defined Custom Groups specifically — auto-derived Project groups respect Sort by, but Custom Groups don't. Looks like the recency sort pass is being applied to the implicit Ungrouped bucket but skipped for members of named Custom Groups.

Related: #55225.

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Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>

+1 from me too. Makes Projects much less useful.

Happening for me too since Claude 1.13576.0 (1290fc)

This is a Claude Desktop UI bug, not a CLI issue — requesting the invalid label be removed and this routed to the desktop app team.

The invalid / "not related to Claude Code" label looks like an auto-triage misfire. This is a reproducible bug in the Claude Code desktop app's session sidebar.

Environment

• Claude Desktop (macOS) v1.5354.0
• Sidebar session organizer (the sliders/filter popover)

Steps to reproduce

1. Open the sidebar filter popover (sliders icon on the list header).
2. Set Group by → Project.
3. Set Sort by → Recency.

Expected: project groups (and/or sessions within them) reorder most-recent-first.

Actual: the Recency radio shows as selected, but the list stays in pure alphabetical order by project name. The sort control has no visible effect while Group by: Project is active.

Confirmed workaround: set Group by → any value other than Project (e.g. none) and Recency sorting takes effect immediately — which isolates the bug to the Group by: Project + Sort by: Recency interaction specifically, not the sort itself.

The common, reasonable expectation is group by project, ordered by recency within/across groups — that combination is currently impossible. Related: #59282, #56067.

Could a maintainer please remove invalid and re-triage to the desktop team? Happy to provide a screen recording if useful.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/80279

Still reproducing on 1.25927.0, and the invalid label is worth revisiting

This is labeled invalid / "doesn't seem to be related to Claude Code", but the same behaviour is present in the desktop app's Code tab, which is Claude Code.

Environment

• Claude desktop app 1.25927.0 (003700), built 2026-08-04T05:34:55Z
• macOS 26.5.2 (25F84), arm64

In the Code tab sidebar, sessions are grouped by project and the group order is strictly alphabetical by project name, exactly the symptom described here. Eleven groups; initials in rendered order: D, D, D, F, L, P, S, S, S, S, T. (Names redacted.) No timestamps on any row. My currently active session is the last row in the list because its project name starts with T.

The workaround in this issue is not available in the Code tab. Changing Group by away from Project fixes it in the sessions list, but the Code tab sidebar exposes no Group by or Sort by control at all on this build. I checked the top of the sidebar (New / Routines / Customize / More), the More menu (Artifacts / Dispatch (Beta) / Customize sidebar), the Customize sidebar dialog itself (a visibility checklist for those four nav items only), and scrolled the session list to the very top. Nothing.

The desktop docs say the Code tab sidebar has "controls at the top of the sidebar to filter sessions by status, project, or environment, and to group sessions by project" (https://code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop). Those controls are not present in 1.25927.0, so the docs and the build disagree.

Net effect in the Code tab is worse than this issue describes: grouping is forced on, and recency is unreachable.

Related: #83590 (no timestamps and non-recency order inside sidebar groups), #25974 (sort by last activity request).

Sort by recency is for the sessions within the groups, not the groups themselves. Sorting the entire groups was causing a lot of instability in the sidebar. Taking a look to ensure the sessions themselves are sorting.

I don't think anyone here has asked for sorting groups by recency. What I see is - inside each group, records are sorted Oldest-to-Newest, which is the opposite of recency. So within each group, my newest thread is buried way dawn in a "show more" box at the bottom - sometimes more than one show more box. This renders the entire groups function unusable to anyone who, like me, makes 2 or 3 new threads every day.

@CompanionLink sorting by "created time" is how you get newer sessions up top. Recency sorts by last activity. There was a bug where Custom Groups weren't respecting the recency sort which should be fixed with the latest release.

Confirmed.

I would absolutely like to have Group-by-folder sort by recency at the folder level AND the session level. Otherwise I'm going to have to keep renaming my current project "Aardvark" and all my projects on hold get renamed to "Zeuss"

Still reproduces on Claude 1.32885.1 (2026-08-18, macOS). #81884 was closed as
a duplicate of this one.

To answer the "groups or sessions?" question in the OP: the defect is at the
group level only. With Group by: Project, none of the three Sort by values
(alpha, created, recency) moves the project group headers. Sessions
inside each group do reorder, and with Group by: None recency works fine on
the flat list, so the comparator itself works and the setting does persist.

With ~70 projects this makes the sidebar unusable for its main job: alphabetical
groups bear no relation to what I'm working on, and Group by: None sorts right
but drops the project label from each row.

Could someone also drop the invalid label? This is the Code tab sidebar
(https://code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop). While the label sits there, the issue
everyone is now being pointed at stays out of triage.

I would absolutely like to have Group-by-folder sort by recency at the folder level AND the session level. Otherwise I'm going to have to keep renaming my current project "Aardvark" and all my projects on hold get renamed to "Zeuss"

In addition to changing recency - I found folder names in the Left Bar UI now have an Up/Down attribute. It's not great, but for the first time I can sort my groups by their importance to me. At least for now this allows me to use groups more productively.

I can confirm this is still happening on Windows, and for users with large Cowork setups it is a serious usability problem.

Current version:
Claude Desktop 1.40609.0 (f65e38)
Build: 2026-08-27T16:19:51Z

I first noticed this behaviour around version 1.14271.0, and it has persisted through many subsequent updates.

The problem is exactly what this issue describes: when conversations are grouped by Project, “Recency” does not behave like actual recent activity.

If I open an older conversation inside a Cowork Project, continue working in it, send new messages, and then leave it, that conversation does not move to the top of the Project.

For someone with a small number of conversations this may look like a minor annoyance. For someone like me, with hundreds of threads spread across dozens of Projects, it is extremely frustrating and materially damages the usefulness of Cowork as a long-term workspace.

A conversation that I was actively using seconds ago can remain buried somewhere deep inside a Project simply because it was originally created weeks or months earlier.

I also tried clearing the relevant Claude Desktop caches, while deliberately avoiding deletion of the actual Cowork session data. It made no difference.

There is also no browser fallback here: Cowork Projects are a Desktop feature, so this behaviour cannot simply be avoided by switching to claude.ai.

What is particularly difficult to understand is how this has survived so many Desktop releases. I originally assumed it was a temporary regression that would disappear in the next update or two, but we are now at 1.40609.0 and the behaviour is still unchanged.

At this point it increasingly looks like either a long-standing regression or an intentional change in how “Recency” is defined.

If “Recency” is intended to mean creation date rather than last activity, then that is, in my view, the wrong behaviour for conversation-based work.

A conversation that receives activity today is an active conversation today, regardless of when it was originally created.

At minimum, Cowork Projects need proper sorting options such as:

• Last activity, newest first
• Date created, newest first
• Date created, oldest first
• Alphabetical
• Ideally manual/custom ordering

But “last activity” should absolutely be available, and in my opinion should be the default.

With hundreds of threads, the current behaviour is genuinely painful. Please restore real most-recent-activity sorting when Group by Project is enabled.

Still present on Claude Desktop 1.46388.3 (macOS 26.6.2, Claude Code 2.1.258), and the control has changed shape since the original report, so here is what it looks like now.

The sidebar control is the "Filter" icon (two vertical lines) at the top of the session list. It offers Group by: Folder / Date and Sort by: Name / Date Created / Last Activity.

With Group by: Folder (the layout most people want, since it keeps project headers), Sort by: Last Activity only orders the sessions inside each folder. The folder groups themselves keep a fixed order that the sort setting does not touch. A new folder, and its first session, lands at the bottom of the list, so with a long project list you scroll to the bottom to find the session you just opened, then drag the folder to the top by hand.

The workaround mentioned earlier (change Group by) no longer helps: the only other choice is Date, which removes the folder headers entirely and shows bare sessions.

Expected: with Group by: Folder and Sort by: Last Activity, the folders themselves should be ordered by their most recent session activity, newest first, so a new or recently used project rises to the top and stale projects sink on their own.

Confirming this on Windows, Claude Desktop 1.46388.2 (cb4596), build 2026-09-04, and adding a data point that should narrow it down quickly.

The two surfaces behave differently on the same account, same build, same data:

Chats and tasks (sidebar) — the Filter control offers Sort by: Name / Date Created / Last activity. With Last activity selected, it works correctly. Post a message in an old thread and it moves to the top as expected.

Cowork Projects — there is no Filter control at all. No Group by, no Sort by, nothing. Threads are ordered by creation date and never reorder on new activity. A thread I posted in 42 minutes ago renders below one from two months earlier, while its own label correctly reads "42 minutes ago".

So last_activity is being written correctly and read correctly by the sidebar. The Projects view is either sorting on creation date or ignoring the field. That rules out stale local cache, corrupted state and platform specifics, and points at the Projects query itself.

Worth noting the recent macOS comment above describes the sidebar control, not the Projects view. They are separate surfaces and I think the reports here are being conflated. The Projects case is the worse of the two, because there is no setting to get wrong and no control to work around it with.

No browser fallback exists either, since Cowork Projects are desktop only.

Ask: expose the same Sort by control in Projects, defaulting to Last activity, and make it actually mean last activity.

Still present on Claude Desktop 1.52386.3 (macOS 26.6.2).

Re: "Sort by recency is for the sessions within the groups, not the groups themselves." Respectfully, that is not what most people here are asking for. With Group by: Folder, the group order is what decides where my active work is. If groups stay alphabetical, my current project can sit at the bottom while untouched ones stay on top, and sorting sessions inside each group barely helps.

Recency across groups is the main reason to use Sort by: Last activity at all.

Partial progress to report, plus a reproduction that isolates what is left.

On Windows, Claude Desktop 2.26454.2 (75afdd), build 2026-10-07, the Project view is now correct. Opening a Project shows Pinned, then Recents in true last-activity order, newest first. That used to be broken and no longer is.

The sidebar is still wrong. Both surfaces read the same account and the same data at the same moment, so they can be compared directly. Same project, same minute, four threads (names redacted):

• Thread A, last activity 10 minutes ago: 1st in the Project view, 7th in the sidebar
• Thread B, 19 hours ago: 2nd in the Project view, 1st in the sidebar
• Thread C, 4 days ago: 7th in the Project view, 3rd in the sidebar
• Thread D, 6 days ago: 8th in the Project view, 4th in the sidebar

There is a second symptom that matters more in daily use. The sidebar truncates each folder to 10 threads with a "View all" link, so it also decides which 10 to show, and it makes that choice on the same wrong key. A thread last touched 22 hours ago sits hidden behind "View all" while threads untouched for far longer occupy visible slots. The most recently active work is not merely in the wrong position, it is sometimes not rendered at all.

Since the Project view already orders correctly from the same data, last_activity is being written and is queryable. The sidebar grouping appears to sort and truncate on creation date instead.

Ask: have the sidebar use the same ordering the Project view now uses, for both the sort and the top-10 selection.