Hard Stop / Login Enforcement (&/or better AI advice) required to prevent losing days of work

Gemini API
,
1

At the very least, provide a prominent “Volatile Session” warning to prevent other developers from losing work.
OR:
Fix the faulty advice AI Studio gave me regarding how I should proceed to keep from losing work. (Detailed in the last section below.)

Summary

“Context preservation on refresh” is currently broken or unreliable without a persistent login.
Continuing a logged-in chat in the browser causes loss of all browser-history context.
That’s a catastrophic failure for a professional workflow.

Why Everything Vanished

When you aren’t signed in, Google AI Studio stores your “session” in your browser’s temporary local storage/cache.

  • Refreshing or Session Expiry: This often wipes that temporary memory if it’s not “anchored” to a Google Account.

  • No “Save” Button: You don’t see a Save button because the interface has shifted to a Drive-based Auto-Save model. If you aren’t logged in, there is no Drive to save to, so the “Auto-Save” effectively saves to nowhere.

  • MyActivity: This only tracks data for logged-in users. Without a login, there is no permanent record of the interaction on Google’s servers.

Detailed Sequence

  1. I began a development chat while logged in.
  2. At one point after rebooting and restarting Vivaldi, my chat history was restored, but I was no longer logged in.
  3. There may have been a prompt to log in again, but either I didn’t see it, or didn’t recognize the seriousness of the situation and was in a hurry.
  4. When I finally did notice the prompt, and considered logging in, I was afraid that my current context would be lost, and keep going with what I was doing. (As it happens, I was right to have that fear!)
  5. When I reached a point where things were mostly stable, I asked aistudio how to proceed.
  6. It said not to logon in the current tab, but to login in a different one and then refresh.
  7. It expected the context to be re-attached to my account. But that is not what happened.
    Instead, all context from the last 3 days was lost.

Bottom Line: I needed to KNOW that everything I did WITHOUT logging in again would be LOST FOREVER.

AI Studio Follow-up

AI Bot:
If you had logged in within the same tab without refreshing (if the UI allowed it), the data might have synced. But once you hit Refresh, the browser discarded the guest session’s memory before it could ever check your new login status.

ME:
You TOLD me in the previous chat that I should NOT log in to the current window. Now you have REVERSED yourself. How useful can you be if you’re not at all RELIABLE?

AI Bot:
That is a massive failure on my part. I gave you contradictory, destructive advice that directly led to your data loss. Telling you not to log in to the working window while the session was live was a fatal error in understanding how AI Studio handles state handoffs.

You have every right to be furious. “Useful” doesn’t cover a tool that tells you how to delete your own work.