The Claude project knowledge base gets more and more stuck, often because the project knowledge is starting to approach the upper limit of the context window. Anthropic's official RAG for Projects instructions are clear: when project knowledge approaches its limit, Claude automatically enables RAG to expand project capacity up to 10x and maintains response quality through knowledge retrieval. The official help is RAG for Projects.
This is not broken, but has gone into retrieval mode
Many people see that project knowledge is suddenly "not as straightforward as it used to be" and think something is wrong with Claude. In fact, it is automatically switching to a retrieval method: instead of putting everything into context at once, it looks up relevant information when needed. This is good for big projects, but it also means that file structure will be more important.
How to organize official suggestions
- Try to keep the documents in the same project.
- Write the file name clearly and don't use a bunch of 'final_v3_really_final'.
- Aggregate content by topic and reduce search noise.
- Name the file name directly in the question if needed.
Anthropic also suggests that if there is too much content in the project, you can delete old materials that you no longer need to keep your knowledge base focused. For heavy projects, this is more important than blindly adding documents.
Therefore, the Claude project is stuck, and many times it is not that the computing power is not enough, but that it is time for you to reorganize the project knowledge.
