Clearing needs an explicit act; opening a new session is only an implicit convention

What it is

The user wants to drop a role that just went off the rails, without losing the file already uploaded and the outline that is already right. The product only offers New chat. New chat drops what should go and what should stay together. Treating “open a new session” as clear is an implicit convention, not a clear act. Explicit clear targets context objects: forget that role, forget that ban, keep the attachment.

The convention holds only when everyone has already learned “new chat = blank mind.” People who have not keep fighting expired settings in the old session. People who have learned it overuse it: every disagreement opens a new thread, and they dismantle their own continuity.

Why it happens

New session happens to be a state boundary in the architecture: new thread, empty history, fresh sample. Designers promote that implementation detail into the only eraser the user gets. The eraser’s grain is the whole notebook; the user wants to erase a page. Two misuses follow: not erasing when they should (pollution continues), erasing when they should not (material is lost).

The convention also fails across products. Some new sessions still carry account-level memory; some are truly blank. “New chat is clean,” learned in product A, breaks in product B, and the leftover pollution is read as a system fault.

Studying it

Set a task “drop the setting, keep the material,” with only new-session versus with per-object clear. Dependent variables: whether the material is still there, whether the expired setting still dominates, whether the user believes they already cleared. Afterwards ask “what did that step you just took actually clear” — if the answer is “probably everything” while account memory remains, the convention has already misled.

Cross-product transfer can be a chained task: learn first in a UI where new session is blank, then move to a UI where new session still carries memory, and see how many turns the wrong expectation lasts.

Where it stops holding

When a blank mind is genuinely required (an unrelated new task, privacy that forbids the next stretch from seeing the last), new session is the right act; keep it, and say what it will drop. With no cross-session memory, no attachments, and a short session, new session and clear almost coincide, and a second act is duplication. A clear that is irreversible and vague in scope is more dangerous than new session; it must list the objects that will vanish first.

Applying it

• Put a clear entry in the session. Default scope is “settings and constraints in this session,” with a separate list of what will not be cleared (attachments, cross-session memory). Use new session when a blank mind is required, and say the difference before the click.
• Do not draw New chat as an eraser icon with no copy. The icon dresses an implementation boundary as user intent.
• Clearing needs a receipt: list the constraints that died. Without a receipt, people cannot tell whether the convention fired.
• Check: run “remove the wrong persona, keep the uploaded table.” If only new session can do it, the table should be gone — that is the price of the implicit convention. After per-object clear, the table stays and the persona does not appear in the next turn. Then ask someone who has never used the product “what do you click to make it forget that last line”; if everyone points at New chat, the entry copy has failed.

Related

• Same group: L2.14.1 Context buys continuity, and it also lets an early misunderstanding keep shaping later output · L2.14.2 People usually cannot tell what the system actually remembered; the context needs an inspectable view · L2.14.4 Memory across sessions hardens a one-shot preference into a standing setting · L2.14.5 When overlong context is truncated, what the user sees is unexplained capability loss
• Nearby: L2.07 Prompt History and Reuse · L6.10 Turning Personalization Off and Resetting It · L2.05 Iterative Revision
• Search terms: explicit context clear · new-chat as eraser · session reset convention