Introducing Projects: A Foundation for Working With AI

Scholarly is fundamentally a product for working with AI. You bring it material, ask questions, create something useful, refine the result, and keep going.

The better AI gets, the more important the space around a single prompt becomes. The AI needs to know what you are trying to accomplish, which material matters, how you want it to work, what has already happened, and where the next result belongs.

We wanted to add a foundational layer for that kind of work.

At first, we thought folders could be that layer. Folders are familiar and useful: they put related files in the same place. But we eventually arrived at a simple conclusion — folders are just folders. They can organize material, but they do not represent the goal behind it. They do not carry working instructions, remember decisions, connect ongoing conversations, or give AI a durable place to act.

That is why we built Projects.

A Project Is the Work, Not Just the Files

A project is a workspace for one outcome: preparing for an exam, investigating a research question, building a client presentation, planning a course, or finishing any other body of work that takes more than one prompt.

Inside a project, you can keep:

• Sources and creations — PDFs, documents, recordings, notes, research, videos, and anything Scholarly creates for the project.
• Project chats — ongoing conversations grounded in the material that belongs to that project.
• Instructions — the goal, audience, standards, and working rules Scholarly should follow every time it helps.
• Project memory — useful context and decisions recalled only inside that project.
• Folders — still doing the job folders do well: organizing the content inside the larger workspace.

When you start a chat from a project, Scholarly can work across its material. When you create something there, the result is filed back into the project automatically. Instead of rebuilding context every time, you can continue from the work that is already there.

Folders Still Matter

Projects do not replace folders. They clarify their role.

A folder answers: Where should these files go?

A project answers: What are we trying to accomplish, and what should the AI know while helping?

That is also why folders now behave like the rest of your content. They appear with your content on Home and in your Library, and they sit beneath Projects in the sidebar. A project can contain folders when its material needs another level of organization, but the project remains the top-level workspace.

If you already organized a body of work in a folder, you can turn that folder into a project in one click and bring its contents with it.

Built Into the Rest of Scholarly

Projects are not a separate destination you have to remember to check. They are part of the workflows you already use:

• Find projects and folders from Search or Cmd+K.
• Browse projects and their folders when choosing sources in any creation modal.
• Move existing content and chats into a project, or move them back out.
• Drop files directly onto a project to add them.
• Share a read-only project with your team, by email, or by link while keeping project chats private.

The goal is simple: once something belongs to a project, Scholarly should preserve that context wherever you encounter it.

The Foundation for What Comes Next

What is shipping now is the foundation, not the finished idea.

Over the next few months, Projects will become much more useful as we add more tools to Scholarly. A durable workspace gives those tools somewhere to understand the goal, use the right material, follow the same instructions, and return useful work. It lets AI participation extend beyond a single chat or generation without making you repeat the setup every time.

Folders made content easier to store. Projects are designed to make AI easier to work with.

Start a Project

1. Open Projects and create a new project.
2. Give it a name and a short brief describing the outcome you want.
3. Add existing content, upload new material, or convert a folder.
4. Set project instructions for how Scholarly should work.
5. Start a chat or create something — the project context stays with the work.

Projects are available now in Scholarly. We will keep expanding what they can do, and we would love to hear what you want your projects to handle next at hello@scholarly.so.