Temporary chats.

A temporary chat is a full conversation with the assistant that is never persisted. Nothing about it is saved: no chat row, no messages, no artifacts, no history entry, no memory extraction. The connection to Anthropic is real; the persistence is skipped.

**How to start one:** - ⌘K → New temporary chat - /chat?new=1&temp=1 as a URL - (No toggle exists to convert an in-flight chat into a temporary one; the choice happens at chat creation)

**What still happens:** - The meal accrual counter increments. Your subscription still reserved whatever fraction of a meal the request cost, in the meal fund. - Usage is metered — the turn costs against this cycle's compute allowance like any other.

**What doesn't happen:** - No message rows written to the database. - No artifacts detected or persisted (even for long code replies). - No sharing (nothing to snapshot). - No sidebar recents entry. - No regenerate / branching (no parent_id to branch from). - No memory extraction.

**UI treatment:** A persistent amber banner sits at the top of the chat reading "TEMPORARY CHAT · NOT SAVED." The assistant is instructed not to say things like "as we discussed earlier" because there is no previous conversation to reference.

**When to use:** - Quick factual lookups you don't want cluttering your history - Testing a prompt formulation without polluting your projects - Asking about something private you'd rather not have in your export - One-off questions to check if the model knows something

**When NOT to use:** - Iterative work you might want to come back to - Anything that produces an artifact worth keeping - Anything you want the assistant to remember

If you're not sure, don't start it as a temp — you can always archive a persistent chat later, but you can't recover a temp one.