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Comment by lumenwrites | Hacker News Reader

I wish they'd implement branching conversations like in ChatGPT. And convenient message editing, that doesn't paste large chunks of text as an non-editable attachment or break formatting.

Seems like such a simple thing to do, relative to developing an AI, yet the minor differences in the UI/UX are what prevents me from using claude a lot more.

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Hi! I’m a product engineer on the Claude.ai team. Claude.ai does support branching conversations. If you hover on a message, there should be an edit button, and once you edit the message, you can again hover on it, which will show you left/right arrows that will switch between the branches. Please let me know if you have any troubles with this!

I'm actually working on an open source product to solve this.

For a long while I've wanted a good "pro" UI that can connect to multiple different llm APIs

Convenient editing and branching is one of the items in my roadmap already, what else do you think I could include?

Good history search (including non "main" conversation branches) and convenient conversation management (bookmarking, folders, maybe something smarter) would be great.

Also, maybe some convenient way to create message templates? I don't know how I'd implement this, I just know that I often write one long prompt that I reuse multiple times, with multiple minor tweaks/edits, and it'd be amazing to have a convenient tool to manage that.

Also, good mobile/tablet support, convenient to use and without bugs (as I happen to spend most of my time writing prompts on my ipad, but that's just me).

If you already have a demo - please share a link, I'd be happy to beta test it and maybe become one of the early customers.

wow, reading your comment is a great mood boost for me because these are literally the exact features I want from my llm chat experience. It's great to see someone with the exact same problem set.

I just followed you on Twitter (I'm @NamanyayG there as well), I'll definitely ping you when I have something to test.

You might be looking for "LLM Web-UI"s. I searched for a while until I found this thread with recommendations:

https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1847qt6/llm_web...

Thanks for the resource! I've seen some of them and the main issue I had is I don't want to self host anything, and I want to use latest third party models as soon as they are released.

Maybe something like what I'm talking about exists already, but I think I'll still try and make my own open source version to fulfill my personal requirements.

We (disclosure: founder) do something similar at Trelent[1] but with an emphasis on security. Paid accounts can use OpenAI & Anthropic models, free ones just OpenAI. We have 3.5 sonnet live already. If you want to try it out lmk! Also totally respect building your own open-source :)

[1]: https://trelent.com

wow Trelent looks cool, how does ZDR negotiation work exactly? What do you offer to the provider that allows you ZDR?

So typically these providers only offer ZDR to "managed" customers, after a lengthy application process. For example, on Azure, "managed" means companies with >$1m, possibly more now, in annual spend. They don't want to waste their time going through this long application process with smaller companies, so we take some of that weight off their shoulders. They get the same revenue at the end of the day, so in many ways it groups smaller companies' LLM spend and sends it straight to their bottom line, and they still get to claim their rolling out AI "responsibly".

Once one provider is cracked, the others fall as well, as these AI companies are all competing viciously for customers. Et voila, ZDR across multiple providers for the small(er) companies out there :)

Pretty much all of the features you mention are already in LibreChat (MIT License). If you don't mind self-hosting, then it has branching, convo search, change models mid-chat, "presets" (save system prompts), and a whole lot more. I've deployed it in my gov agency for months now, and I've had amazing feedback. https://github.com/danny-avila/LibreChat

"I wish they'd implement branching conversations like in ChatGPT"

Can you say more about this?

I Google'd and I'm not finding much. I asked ChatGPT and its response was not the assumption I held about what "branching" meant [0].

[0] https://chatgpt.com/c/6b2e0f7c-c4e6-44df-9116-ac7f618200f2

I just mean that when you click the button to generate a new version of the response (or edit your own message), ChatGPT shows you the arrow buttons enabling you to go to the previous version of it, and that works for all the messages, so you can go back up a few messages and try a different version of the conversation, without losing what you've had before.

Shit, I never noticed that arrow...

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