Projects mastery.

A Project in LADLE is a container that persists context — files, Voice Guide, and a set of related chats — across sessions. Individually a Project doesn't sound like much. In practice, it's the difference between LADLE feeling like a scratch pad and LADLE feeling like it knows you and what you're working on.

Most people never use them. The people who do report that LADLE became a different-category tool once they did.

The mental model

Think of a Project as "an ongoing work stream". Not a task, not a document — a stream of related work that will span days or weeks. Examples:

- "Q3 planning" — Voice Guide (your PRD writing style), attached files (last quarter's OKRs, the strategy doc, the customer research), chats (multiple discussions about specific Q3 initiatives). - "Customer onboarding rewrite" — Voice Guide (your product-marketing voice), attached files (current onboarding docs, the design mocks, user research), chats (about copy, flow, edge cases). - "Reading pile" — Voice Guide (your note-taking style), attached files (papers you're processing), chats (one per paper with your synthesis).

The pattern is: shared context (files + voice) applies to every chat in the Project, so you don't re-establish it every time.

Voice Guides that actually work

A Voice Guide is a plain-text document you write once that describes how you want LADLE to respond in this Project. Not a template — prose. Half a page to a page.

What to include: - **Register**: dry, warm, formal, technical? Give 2-3 example sentences in the target register. - **Structural conventions**: bullet lists vs prose? Section headers vs paragraphs? Length norms? - **Forbidden patterns**: "no exclamation marks", "never say 'excited to announce'", "no emoji", "no LLM-tell phrases like 'let me know if you need more'". - **Sample voice**: 3-5 short paragraphs of writing that sounds like you'd want the output to sound. This is the most important part. The model learns your voice from examples faster than from rules.

The test: attach the guide, ask LADLE to write a two-paragraph note on any topic, compare it to how you would have written it. If the register is off, add 2 more voice examples and iterate. This takes 20 minutes and pays back forever.

Attaching files to a Project

Files in a Project are re-read on every message in that Project. This is powerful (LADLE remembers the context automatically) and costly (files eat context tokens every message).

The heuristic: - Attach files that are load-bearing across most chats in the Project (the strategy doc that everything references). - Don't attach files that are relevant only to one specific chat (attach those to the chat directly). - Prune monthly. Old files that no longer matter should come off.

Multi-chat patterns

The productive pattern inside a Project is many focused chats, not one giant one. Chat 1: "outline the customer-onboarding rewrite scope". Chat 2: "draft the empty-state copy". Chat 3: "specific edge case for users who deleted their first item". Each chat inherits the Project's context; each stays focused enough to be efficient.

The failure pattern: one Project, one 200-message chat that covers everything. This is bad both for token efficiency (the chat processes all history every message) and for coherence (LADLE loses the thread across 200 messages).

Shared Projects on Team plans

On Team plans, Projects are workspace-level. Any member of the workspace can see and use them. The Voice Guide is shared — every chat any team member has in that Project inherits it. This is the highest-leverage team pattern in LADLE.

The classic use: your team's "How we write" Voice Guide, attached to a "Team default" Project. Every teammate uses it for drafts. The team's writing across memos, PRDs, and customer replies starts sounding coherent — because the same voice model is operating behind everyone's drafts.

Project management

- **Renaming**: any time. Doesn't affect chats. - **Archiving**: hides the Project from your sidebar without deleting anything. Reversible. - **Deleting**: removes the Project and all its chats within 24 hours. Not reversible. Confirmation dialog explicit. - **Duplicating**: creates a new Project with the same Voice Guide and file attachments (fresh chats). Useful when spinning up a variant of an existing workflow.

What to do this week

Pick one ongoing work stream. Create a Project for it. Write a half-page Voice Guide. Attach the 2-3 files that will be relevant across most of your work in this stream. Move your next 5 chats about this work into that Project. That's the minimum viable Project setup, and the difference will be obvious within a week.