A chat is a single conversation. A project is a folder of related chats that also carries its own standing instructions. Together they're how you keep months of AI work findable instead of scrolling through an undifferentiated list. This is one of the features of Secret Chat AI, the AI aggregator that keeps your history in your own browser.
Chats
- Start one by sending a message. There's no "create chat" step — type and send, and the conversation appears in the sidebar, named automatically from what you asked.
- Rename it. The auto-generated name is a starting point. Rename any chat from its menu in the sidebar when it turns into something else.
- Switch models inside it. A chat isn't bound to the model that started it. Change model from the dropdown and keep going: the conversation carries over, which is what makes asking a second model to check the first one's answer a one-click operation. The same applies to the AI Council: switch a chat to a council and the whole panel reads the conversation, so the answer being checked is the one already on your screen.
- Ask in several chats at once. An answer belongs to the chat that asked for it, not to the screen: while one chat is being answered you can open another and ask there, and each answer lands in its own conversation. Chats still being answered are marked with a spinner in the sidebar, and when an answer arrives in a chat you have left, the app tells you.
- A slow answer survives a reload. Closing the tab, reloading the page or a phone killing the browser mid-answer doesn't lose the question: the app remembers which answers it was waiting for (on the device, never as chat content) and picks them up the next time it opens, for up to a day. Only pressing Stop in that chat ends a turn.
- Summarize a long chat and carry on in a fresh one. Every message you send carries the whole conversation with it, so a long chat costs a little more with each turn. From the fourth message on, a "Summarize chat" button under the last answer folds everything settled so far — the goal, the decisions, the facts, figures and names, the current state, the open points — into one summary, written by the cheapest model of the family the chat is on (or GPT Luna). Under the summary a button opens a fresh chat, in the same project, that starts from that summary as its first message, so each message there costs a fraction of what it did. When a chat grows past about 200,000 tokens the app does this by itself: it writes the summary, opens the fresh chat and closes the old one, with a note in place of the message box explaining why. The old chat, its summary and every message in it stay readable. Only single-model chats are summarised — an AI Council has several answers to a turn, not one.
- Delete it. Deleting asks for confirmation, and it's final: the chat lives in your browser, so there's no server-side copy to restore it from.
Projects
Create a project for a piece of work that will span more than one conversation: a case, a client, a book, a house move. Chats inside a project sit under it in the sidebar rather than in the general list.
- Project instructions. Every project can carry its own system prompt, applied to every chat inside it. "You are helping me with a contract dispute in California; be precise about dates and quote the clause you are relying on" only has to be written once. See custom instructions.
- Project files. A project can also carry up to 20 files as standing context — a style guide, a glossary, a contract, a spreadsheet, code, a logo, a scanned brief — and every chat inside it starts with them. Documents are read in your browser like any attached document (docx, xlsx, pptx, csv, md, txt, code, zip): only the extracted text is kept, up to 400,000 characters per project, and the original file never leaves your device. Images and PDFs are compressed and kept as they are, like one attached to a message, up to 10 MB per project. Because the files go out with every message, each turn in the project is billed for them; a model that reads no images or PDFs is sent the documents only, and the free models, which take no attachments, ignore them all — the chat says so above the message box.
- Move chats in and out. A conversation that turns out to belong to a project can be moved into it later, and moved back out again.
- Rename and delete. Both are available from the project's menu; deleting asks for confirmation first.
Finding things again
- Filter the sidebar. Type into the filter box and the chat list narrows to matching names as you type, usually faster than scrolling once you have a few hundred conversations.
- Library. One entry above the projects unfolds into Images, Documents, Tables, Charts, Presentations, Articles and Social posts — everything the generators made for you, across every chat and project, each on its own page. A card opens the thing itself (a document in its preview, a picture full size with arrows to page through the rest and a download button), names the chat (and project) it came from as a link that opens the chat on that message, downloads it in any format its generator offers (DOCX, PDF, PPTX, XLSX, CSV, JPG, Markdown, HTML), and can take it into a new chat to edit in the same generator — a picture goes into the message box as an attachment, a document into a fresh chat with the prompt and the answer that made it; up to twenty at once from the selection bar. The same bar downloads a selection at once: one file for one item, a single ZIP for several. Entries can be deleted from there — one, a selection, or the whole list — and deleting one removes it from the chat too, in every thread that shares it. In a chat, clicking a generated picture opens the same viewer, paging through every picture the chat produced.
- Threads stay attached. A conversation branched off another appears nested under its parent rather than as an unrelated entry, so the shape of a long exploration stays visible. See threads.
- Clear everything. Two "broom" buttons empty the chat list and the project list wholesale, for when you want a clean browser rather than a tidy one. Both confirm first.
Where all of this is stored
Projects, chats, messages and attachments live in your own browser (IndexedDB for the conversations, OPFS for files) not in a database on our servers. Three practical consequences follow from that, and they're worth knowing before you rely on the app:
- Clearing your browser data deletes them. Not "archives" — deletes. There's no server-side copy for us to restore.
- They do not follow you to another device. Nothing syncs, because there's nothing on our side to sync from.
- Export is your backup. It produces a ZIP of every project, chat, message and attachment, which Import loads into any browser. If you keep anything you would miss, export it periodically.
That's the trade the app is built around: the reason your conversations can't be handed over, correlated or mined is that we don't hold them. Keeping your own copy is the price of that.