Chats are great for asking a question. Projects are great for thinking about a problem.
For most of Arka's life there was only one container for your conversations: a flat list called Recent. It worked when you had three chats. It stopped working when you had thirty. So we built Projects.
What a project is — and what it is not
A project is a small, named container for related chats and notes. It is not a folder, because folders imply file hierarchy and most people's thinking is not hierarchical. It is closer to a workspace — a place where the context of what you are doing lives, so the chats inside it can pick up where they left off.
Every project has three things: a name, a one-line description of what you are trying to achieve, and a set of chats attached to it. Nothing more, by design.
How to create and use Projects in Arka
Open the sidebar. You will see a Projects entry under Chats. Click it. You will land on a page that lists every project you have, sorted by activity, with a search bar at the top and a New project button on the right.
To attach the current chat to a project, hit the + button inside the chat box and pick Add to project. A submenu shows your project list and a New project option at the bottom. Picking it opens a modal: name your project, describe what you are trying to achieve, hit Create.
The chat is now part of that project. The next time you open it, Arka has the project context.
The default How to use Arka project
The first time you log in after this update, you will find a project called How to use Arka already there. It is a getting-started guide for every feature in the app — what each button does, what each menu means, where the limits live. You cannot delete it. It is the kind of help you wish came with every product.
Everything else in your Projects page is yours, and yours alone. Projects live in your browser's localStorage, scoped to your user ID. We do not have a server copy. Read more about how we handle data in our privacy policy.
What's next for Projects
Three things on the immediate roadmap: cross-device sync so your projects follow you between phone and laptop, shared projects for the Team plan introduced in our new pricing page, and project-specific memory so Arka remembers facts only within a given workspace.