u/ExistingCard9621

Hey all 👋

I use Claude Cowork with Projects to keep different clients/areas separate, and I've hit a wall I'm surprised isn't more talked about.

Each project needs a different set of MCP connectors. For example:

• Project A → Shopify + ClickUp
• Project B → Notion + Gmail

But connectors live at the account level, so all of them get pulled into every project. The context gets bloated with tools that have nothing to do with what I'm working on.

What I've already figured out (so I'm not asking the obvious):

• The per-connector toggle in the + → Connectors menu is per-conversation — it doesn't stick to a Project, so I'd have to re-toggle every new chat.
• The Auto / On-demand / Always-available "Tool access" modes only show up in claude.ai chat, not in Cowork (at least not for my account yet).
• There's no way I can find to bind a connector set to a Project.

So my question: is there an established way people handle this? Curious what's actually working for you —

• Just disciplined per-chat toggling?
• Disconnect/reconnect connectors as you switch projects?
• Splitting work across surfaces (Cowork vs Claude Code with per-project .mcp.json)?
• Some Plugins trick?
• Something I'm completely missing?

There has to be a sane pattern for this and I feel like I'm doing it the dumb way. Thanks! 🙏

Posting in case it saves someone the rabbit hole I just went down. Symptom: the Claude extension is installed + active in Chrome, Claude Desktop's browser features work fine, but Claude Code (CLI) keeps saying "Browser extension is not connected" — and /chrome → select browser throws a weird

JSON Parse error: Unexpected identifier "Browser".

I went deep on native-messaging manifests, Chrome profiles, reinstalls, endless restarts… none of that was the fix.

What actually fixed it: re-authenticating Claude Code (sign out, sign back in), then restart Chrome + the CLI.

Connected instantly.

That generic error is misleading — in my case it was just a stale auth token on the CLI side, not anything wrong with the extension or config. So before you rabbit-hole: re-auth first.

(macOS, Chrome 148, Claude Code 2.1.160 — but should apply generally.)