Hatchik help → Draft and live

Draft and live

Every project has two versions of itself: a draft you look at first, and the live one everybody else sees. Where the draft lives depends on which kind of project it is, and that is the first thing to get straight.

Where the draft is How long it lasts
An app (the paid kind, with a database) A permanent address, dev.<name>.hatchik.com Always there
A free website A one-off preview link Claude gives you when it publishes a draft 24 hours

Everything below about locks, keys and how a change reaches the public is the same for both. The rest of this page says dev.<name>.hatchik.com because that is the app case; if you have a free website, read that as "the preview link Claude just gave you".

The draft is locked. For an app it is at dev.<name>.hatchik.com and it is where Claude builds. You can open it, click around it and change your mind as many times as you like.

Locked means: that address shows a "this draft is private" page to anybody who asks for it. The only way in is through your Hatchik account. Open your project at app.hatchik.com and press Open draft — that lets your browser in, on that device, for a month. Typing the dev. address straight into a browser will not work, and neither will sending it to a friend.

Claude can open your draft too, so it can check its own work. It is the only other thing that can.

One thing to know about it. What is really going on is that your project has a key, and your draft is shown to whoever holds the key. Pressing Open draft is what gives your browser a copy. That means: if you deliberately pass your key on — for example by sharing a link Claude gave itself — whoever you passed it to can open the draft as well. It is a lock on the door, not a list of who you are. If you ever want to be sure nobody else can get in, open the project at app.hatchik.com and press Change the key. Every way in that existed before stops working — yours included, so you press Open draft once more afterwards.

The live site is public. It is at <name>.hatchik.com, plus your own web address if you have added one. This is the one your customers see.

How a change reaches the public

  1. You ask Claude for a change.
  2. Claude publishes it to your draft and gives you the draft link.
  3. You look at it.
  4. If you are happy, you say so, and Claude makes it live.

Making it live copies the exact files you previewed. The live site shows what you saw in the draft — not a fresh rebuild that might have drifted.

If you skip step 3, you are publishing something nobody has looked at. Claude is told to wait for you, but you can tell it to go straight to live if you want to.

A free website's draft, in full

A free website has no second copy of itself running all the time — that is part of what makes it free. Instead, when Claude publishes to your draft it builds the new version of the site on its own address and hands you the link. You open it, you look, you say yes or ask for changes.

Three things follow from that, and none of them is a problem if you know it:

When a website becomes an app — the point at which it needs to remember something about the people using it — it gets the permanent draft address with everything else.

An app's data is separate too

An app gets two databases, one for the draft and one for the live site. They never mix. That is on purpose: it means Claude can test a change against throwaway data without touching the real thing.

It also causes the most common false alarm on Hatchik. If you added a record on your draft and then looked at your live site, the record is not missing — it is in the draft's database, where you put it. Read the "Your data" page.

The draft is not a backup

The draft is a work in progress and gets overwritten every time Claude publishes to it. What protects your live site is the saved versions, described on the "Going back" page, and the full download, described on the "Your data" page.

The same page as plain text, for an AI or anything else that prefers it: /docs/draft-and-live.md

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