Cowork: file read/write broken inside Projects, works outside Projects (macOS, v1.22209.3)
Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Jul 19, 2026
Summary
In Claude Desktop (Cowork), file reading/writing works in sessions outside Projects but is broken in sessions inside a Project. This persists on v1.22209.3 — i.e. after the 2026-07-16 build (1.22209.0) whose changelog lists several Cowork document-handling fixes ("documents not reliably opening in the editor", "working documents disappearing from the Documents panel").
Environment
- Claude Desktop 1.22209.3 (macOS, Apple Silicon — MacBook Air M2)
- macOS (Darwin 25.5.0)
- Consumer account (Max plan), Cowork / local agent mode
What happens
- Cowork sessions started inside a Project: Claude cannot reliably read or write files (working-folder file access fails). The feature is effectively unusable inside Projects.
- The same operations in a session outside any Project work fine.
- One session created before the breakage ("folder attached" to the session, inside a Project) continues to work — only newly started in-Project sessions are affected. This suggests something about how new in-Project sessions acquire folder access/permissions.
- First noticed ~mid-July 2026; re-tested and still broken on 1.22209.3 (2026-07-19).
Expected
File read/write inside Project-homed Cowork sessions behaves the same as outside Projects.
Possibly related (all closed as duplicates / stale, none an exact match)
- #45076 — Cowork session history / project metadata silently lost between sessions (macOS)
- #56484 — Cowork Projects and Chats disappeared
- #40300 — Editing project folder path does not update file access permissions
Happy to provide logs / run diagnostics — tell me what you need.