# 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](https://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:

- **The link is new each time.** Ask for another change and you get another
  link. Use the newest one.
- **It lasts 24 hours.** After that the draft is cleared away. Nothing has been
  lost — your live site is untouched and the change can simply be made again.
  If you come back two days later and publishing says there is nothing waiting,
  that is what happened.
- **There is no `dev.` address.** Typing `dev.<name>.hatchik.com` for a free
  website will not find anything, because there is nothing there to find.

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.