alt Hacker NewsI've been saying for ages that I want to be able to fork conversations so I can experiment with the direction an exchange takes without irrevocably poisoning a promising well. I can't do this with ChatGPT, is anyone aware of a provider that offers this as a feature?
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I once built something like this for fun as a side project.
You can highlight some text in a chat and fork the chat to talk about that text selection, so the LLM has context of that along with the previous chat history and it responds in a new chat (entire chat history up to that point from the parent chat gets copied over - basically inspired by the Unix `fork`).
Your text selection from the parent chat would get turned into a hyperlink to the new child chat so you can always get to it again if you're reading the parent chat.
T3.chat supports convo forking and in my experience works really well.
The fundamental issue is that LLMs do not currently have real long term memory, and until they do, this is about the best we can do.
I need to think about this a bit more, but I think I would love a thread feature in ChatGPT, so that it has the context up to the point of creation but doesn’t affect the main conversation. It would help in two ways, it keeps the main topic from getting poisoned , and allow me to minimise text clutter when i go off on tangents during the conversation.
On Openrouter you can delete previous answers (and questions) and maintain a separate conversation with different models.
But it would indeed be nice to either disable answers (without deleting them) or forking a conversation. It wouldn't be hard to implement; I wonder if there's a market for just this?
Some 3rd party UIs offer this, I use typingmind sometimes that does but AFAIK some open source ones do too.
If you're happy running local models, llama.cpp's built-in web-server's interface can do this.
I believe Claude has forking in their web interface.
I stumbled upon this issue myself when designing prompts for agentic systems and got mad at the lack of tools to support this flow, so I built one myself! I called it Experiment, it allows easy conversation forking and editing while retaining all logs.
Google AI studio, ChatGPT and Claude all support this. Google AI studio is the only one that let's you branch to a separate chat though. For ChatGPT and claude you just edit the message you want to branch from.