Keep your AI sharp in long chats.

You explain the same thing five times and your AI still gets it wrong. The chat has got too long, and the one fact that matters is buried under everything else you've said.

This page explains why it happens, how to tell when a chat has gone stale and the prompt that moves you to a fresh one without losing anything.

THE CONTEXT WINDOW

Your AI works on a budget.

Every AI reads your chat inside a context window, which is a limit on how much text it can hold at once. The biggest models now hold about a million tokens, and a token is roughly three quarters of a word.

Every message you send and every reply it gives goes into one pile, and each time you send something new, the AI re-reads the whole pile from the top. Fifty messages in, your instruction from the start is competing with every draft, correction and side question since, and the AI can't tell which part matters most.

That's why quality drops long before the window is full. More text in the pile means more noise around the answer you need.

WHEN TO MOVE

Five signs a chat has gone stale.

Any one of these is enough. Stop arguing and start a new chat.

It repeats a mistake you already corrected.: You fixed it ten messages ago and it's back.
It forgets a decision.: The budget, the deadline or the name you agreed on quietly changes.
It ignores a rule you set.: You asked for under 100 words and it keeps writing 300.
It contradicts itself.: This answer disagrees with one it gave you earlier in the same chat.
It slows down.: Replies take longer to arrive, because there's more to re-read every time.

Paste this into the old chat before you leave it. It writes a short note in three parts: what you're doing, what you've decided and what comes next. Open a new chat, paste the note in and carry on from there.

The handover prompt.

This chat has got long, and I'm moving to a fresh one. Before I do, write me a
handover note I can paste into the new chat.

Write it in three parts, in this order:

DOING. One or two sentences on the job we're working on and who it's for.

DECIDED. Every decision we've made in this chat that still stands, one line
each. Keep numbers, names, dates and rules exactly as we agreed them. Leave out
anything we tried and dropped.

NEXT. The very next step, then the one after it.

Keep the whole note under 200 words. Don't include our back-and-forth, your
earlier drafts or anything I rejected. If something important is still
undecided, add one last line called OPEN that names it.

SAVE TOKENS

Five habits that keep chats short.

One job per chat.
The launch plan gets one chat and the supplier email gets another. Mixing them fills the pile twice as fast.
Keep standing facts out of the chat.
Your prices, your tone and your rules belong in a project or a context file that loads on its own, so you never retype them.
Paste only the part you need.
If the question is about one page of a 40-page document, give it the one page.
Edit your message instead of arguing.
When a reply misses, go back and edit the message you sent. Arguing adds two more messages to the pile and fixes nothing.
Move at the first sign.
A fresh chat with a good handover note costs you one minute. Pushing on in a stale one costs you the afternoon.

LEVEL TWO

The fix that lasts is level two.

A handover note rescues one chat. Writing your business down once, in a file your AI reads at the start of every chat, means you stop repeating yourself in all of them. That's level two of the method, and the Context Interview Prompt gets you there in 20 minutes.

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