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Conversations

Conversations are the primary way you interact with Workshop. They follow a chat structure and are made up of pairs of user-Workshop interactions called turns. Each conversation lives within a project and maintains its own history, context, and state. You can have multiple conversations within the same project — useful for separating different features, debugging sessions, or exploration threads.

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Starting a new conversation in a new project

Click the Home button at the top of the left panel, then type your prompt. Starting a conversation from the Home screen creates a new project and assigns the conversation to it.

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Starting a new conversation in an existing project

Navigate to the project you want from the Home screen, then write your prompt in the input field. The new conversation will be associated with that project, sharing its files, context, and settings.
A conversation can only belong to a single project, but a project can contain many conversations.

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When to start a new conversation

Start a new conversation when you:
  • Begin working on a separate feature or task
  • Want a clean context window after a long session
  • Need to explore an alternative approach without affecting your current thread
  • Have used /compact to condense and continue (the parent becomes read-only)
Continue an existing conversation when you:
  • Are iterating on the same feature
  • Need Workshop to remember recent decisions and context
  • Are debugging something discussed earlier in the thread

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Projects

A project is a structured container for your work with Workshop. It groups conversations, files, settings, and context around a specific goal or codebase. On your file system, a project corresponds to a specific directory. Projects ensure that all actions, code, and files are associated with the correct context. The environment you set up in one conversation is available to other conversations in the same project.

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The project screen

Each project has its own page with the following sections:

Project Overview

A description rendered from the README.md file in the project directory.

Conversations

A list of all conversations in the project. Click any conversation to navigate to it.

Rules for AI

Project-specific rules rendered from .memex/rules.md that guide Workshop’s behavior.

Code

A browser for all assets in the project directory.

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Creating a new project

Click ”+ New Project” on the Home screen. You will be prompted to choose between:
  1. Create new project under the Workspace directory — use this when starting from scratch. Provide a project name and Workshop creates the directory for you.
  2. Select existing folder — use this when you have an existing codebase or directory you want Workshop to work on.

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Creating a project from a template

Workshop Templates are ready-made starting points. Browse them under Templates on the Home screen. When you select a template, Workshop clones it into your local environment and it becomes available as one of your projects.

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The .memex/ directory

Every Workshop project can include a .memex/ directory at its root. This directory contains project-level configuration that Workshop reads automatically: 
your-project/
├── .memex/
│   ├── context.md      # Project context — what Workshop should know
│   ├── rules.md        # Project rules — how Workshop should behave
│   └── skills/         # Custom skills for specialized tasks
├── src/
├── README.md
└── ...
The primary project context file. Workshop reads this at the start of every conversation to understand your project’s architecture, tech stack, conventions, and current state.You can update it manually or use the /context command to have Workshop generate it based on your current conversation and project files.
Project-specific rules that guide Workshop’s behavior. Use this for coding standards, naming conventions, framework preferences, or any consistent guidelines Workshop should follow across all conversations in this project.
Custom skills that extend Workshop’s capabilities for your project. Skills are reusable instruction sets for specialized tasks like deployment workflows, testing patterns, or domain-specific operations.

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Context file precedence

Workshop checks for context files in the following order, using the first one found:
PriorityFileDescription
1 (highest).memex/context.mdWorkshop’s native context format
2.memex/rules.mdWorkshop’s rules file
3.cursor/rules/*.mdcCursor-compatible rules (all files concatenated)
4 (lowest).cursorrulesLegacy Cursor rules file
If you’re migrating from another AI coding tool, Workshop automatically picks up your existing .cursorrules or .cursor/rules/ files — no changes needed.

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Working across environments

Workshop Cloud — Projects live on a cloud virtual machine. You can download project files or sync the entire project to Workshop Desktop to continue working locally. Workshop Desktop — A project corresponds to a directory in your Workspace folder on your computer. Workshop has direct access to your local file system. Both environments share the same project structure and conversation model, so your workflow stays consistent regardless of where you build.