Saving your work, projects and accounts
Why there's an account at all
Opening English, poking around and running the worked examples costs you nothing and needs no account. Translating your own English into code does, because every translation is a real AI call that we pay for.
It's a free Little Bird customer account, the same one you'd use to buy a resistor. There's no plan, no subscription and no card. Sign in at /account/login or create one at /account/register, or just do it from inside the IDE without losing your place.
If you clicked Translate first and then signed in, the translation runs by itself as soon as you're through. Whatever you'd typed while signed out is kept and saved into your account.
There's no Save button
Once you're signed in, your work saves itself a second or two after you stop typing, and a small "saved" toast confirms it. That's on purpose. A Save button is one more thing to forget.
A saved project keeps your English, the generated code and its line links, the App tab's HTML, and your settings (board, baud rate, target language). Sign in on another computer and your most recent project comes back.
The one edge to know about: there's no save when you close the tab, so if you shut the browser within a second or so of your last keystroke, that last edit may not have made it. Pause for a breath before you close, or export a copy.
Signed out, your work stays in this browser
Nothing is sent to us while you're signed out. Your work sits in this browser's local storage, which means clearing site data, using a private window, or switching to another computer will lose it.
If you're doing anything you'd be sad to lose, sign in before you start, or use Export to save a .english file you can import later.
The projects menu
The project button in the English pane header keeps several projects side by side, with new, duplicate, rename, delete, export and import.
Worth understanding: that list lives in this browser only, and your account holds the one project you currently have open. So treat the projects menu as a scratchpad for this machine, and treat Export as the way to move something properly. If you're keeping several pieces of work, export each one to a .english file rather than trusting the menu to sync.
Import only accepts .english files this IDE exported, and it creates a new project rather than writing over the one you have open.
Limits
A saved project can hold about 64 KB of English and 256 KB all up, which is far more than any sensible program. Over that you'll see "project too large to save", usually because the App tab has a lot of HTML in it.
Saving is rate limited to 120 saves a minute, and translating to 60 a minute. Normal editing won't come close, but a script hammering the page will.
