Projects¶
A project is the basic unit of organization in Illinois Chat: an assistant scoped to a topic, course, research group, or team.
Each project bundles together:
- A knowledge base — the documents and crawled web pages the assistant can draw on. Documents in one project are completely isolated from every other project; retrieval never crosses project boundaries.
- Settings — the default LLM, temperature, and system prompt used for conversations.
- Access controls — owners, admins, an approved user list, and a public/private toggle. See Sharing & Access Control.
- Tools — optional custom tools the LLM can invoke during conversations. See Tools & Workflows.
- An API key — for programmatic access. See the API Reference.
Project URL¶
Every project gets a permanent, shareable URL based on its name:
Project names must be unique across the instance and become part of the URL, so pick something short and recognizable (for example ece-408 or soil-science-lab).
Key pages within a project¶
| Page | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Chat | The conversation interface your users see. |
| Materials | Upload documents, start web crawls, organize document groups, export documents. |
| Prompting | Customize the system prompt (e.g. tutor mode). |
| Tools | Enable or disable custom tools. |
| Analysis | Usage analytics and conversation-history export. |
| API | Generate and rotate the project API key. |
| Settings | Default model, access control, and project administration. |
Roles¶
| Role | Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Owner | Full control, including deleting the project. |
| Admin | Manage documents, settings, exports, and API keys — everything except deletion. |
| Regular user | Chat with the assistant. |