The temporary chat: what it is, and what it isn't.

LADLE has a temporary chat mode. You toggle it from the composer. The reply streams normally. Nothing about the request or the reply gets written to the LADLE database. Nothing shows up in your history. Refresh the page and the chat is gone.

Two questions come up about this feature. Let me answer both directly.

**"Is the request still sent to Anthropic?"**

Yes. The model produces the reply through the same Anthropic API call as a normal chat. Anthropic's stated policy is that API requests aren't used for training, and their retention window for API traffic is 30 days by default (configurable to zero for enterprise). We haven't invented a way to make a request to a model without the request being made.

So "temporary" at LADLE means: LADLE doesn't store it. It does NOT mean: the request never happened at any layer of the stack. The Anthropic API sees it either way; it just isn't logged in our database or associated with your account beyond what Anthropic already sees.

**"What is temporary chat FOR, then?"**

A few practical uses:

Testing a prompt without cluttering your history. If you're iterating on a prompt to see what shape works, you don't necessarily want six half-attempts in your recent chats. Temporary chats let you experiment without leaving evidence in your own workspace.

Sensitive drafts you don't want to accidentally re-open on the wrong device. A resignation letter, a medical question, a break-up message. Not "we've protected the API from processing it," but "no one who picks up your laptop later can scroll through your history to it."

Questions you'd delete anyway. If your answer is "I'm just going to delete this after," temporary is the delete-in-advance version. One less step.

**What temporary chats DON'T do:**

They don't stop the request from being processed by Anthropic. They don't provide extra encryption. They don't route through a separate provider. They don't skip the usage counter — the tokens still count against your monthly budget. They don't skip the meal accrual either — you funded meals; your usage funded meals.

**What we deliberately kept:**

The Anthropic policy that governs LADLE API traffic is the same for temporary and persistent chats: no training on API data, standard 30-day trust and safety window. If Anthropic ever changed that, we would tell you.

The kitchen panel works on temporary chats. You can still see which model produced the reply and what the routing decision was. That's local information — it lives in the response headers, not in a database.

**A subtle point.**

Temporary is not "incognito." Incognito browser modes hide activity from the browser's local storage but do nothing about what your ISP or the sites you visit see. Temporary at LADLE hides activity from LADLE's database but does nothing about what Anthropic's API sees.

If your threat model needs "not even Anthropic sees it," temporary chat isn't the tool. Running an open-weights model locally is. That's a different product than LADLE, and we're happy to recommend it for the cases where it matters.

For most everyday cases where you don't want the chat sitting in your history? Temporary is exactly what it should be.