[FEATURE] Claude Cowork: Project chats sort by creation date, not last activity — actively-used chats get buried

Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Aug 18, 2026

Preflight Checklist

  • [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
  • [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

Summary:
Within a Claude Cowork Project, the chat list (both the project page and the left sidebar) is ordered by creation date rather than last activity. A chat I use daily — last message 3 minutes ago — appears mid-list between chats created on Jul 21 and Jul 16, because it was originally created in mid-July. The sidebar only surfaces the first ~10 chats of that creation-ordered list, so my most-used chat is never visible without searching.

Expected behavior:
Chats with the most recent activity should appear at the top (matching the convention of the main chat list, Slack, email, etc.), or at minimum there should be a sort toggle (last active / created) and/or the ability to pin chats.

Impact:
The more I reuse a long-running chat, the more buried it stays. Power users who organize daily work into projects are hit hardest. The only workarounds are search or bookmarking chat URLs.

Request:

  1. Default sort by last activity within projects
  2. Or a user-selectable sort option
  3. Or pinning chats to the top of a project

Proposed Solution

Request:

  1. Default sort by last activity within projects
  2. Or a user-selectable sort option
  3. Or pinning chats to the top of a project

Alternative Solutions

_No response_

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

Configuration and settings

Use Case Example

A user organizes their work in a Cowork Project and maintains a small set of long-running chats, each dedicated to a recurring workflow (e.g., "Weekly report", "Data analysis", "Team FAQ"). They return to these same chats daily or weekly to preserve context and avoid re-explaining background.

On June 1, the user creates the chat "Data analysis" inside the Project.
Over the following weeks, they create 15 other chats in the same Project for one-off questions.
The user continues messaging "Data analysis" every day — it is by far their most active chat, last used minutes ago.

Current behavior: The Project chat list and sidebar order chats by creation date. "Data analysis" remains anchored at its June 1 position, buried below 15 newer one-off chats. The sidebar shows only the first ~10 chats by creation date, so the user's most-used chat is not visible at all. The only ways to reach it are scrolling through "View all" or searching by name — every single day.

Expected behavior: A chat that was active minutes ago appears at or near the top of the list, consistent with the main (non-project) chat list and with conventions in every mainstream messaging tool. Alternatively, the user can pin the chat or choose a "last active" sort.

Impact: The sorting penalizes the exact usage pattern Projects encourage — maintaining long-lived, context-rich chats. The more a chat is reused, the more buried it becomes relative to newly created chats.

Additional Context

_No response_

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