Ask HN: Why do none of the LLM providers let you delete/edit messages in the UI?
But many of the providers lock their best models behind their interface before the developers get access, or lock features behind them.
Why can’t we delete messages? It just seems like common sense to me. I spend way too much time “ruining” a thread then spending 20 minutes getting a new thread back to where I previously was. All because I can’t delete the messages that derailed everything.
Just being able to right click and “delete” or “edit” any message in the chat would be the biggest upgrade to user experience in my opinion. Then when the LLM inevitably hallucinates or misunderstands you don’t have to fight to get it back on track or abandon it altogether and start a new chat and potentially spend 20 minutes priming the chat.
It’s also trivially simple to implement. I wonder if the providers have some explicit reason for this? Is it to bias people to start new chats rather than have long ones which saves them money? I just feel like there has to be a reason this dead simple feature isn’t possible. In the API it’s literally just changing the messages array that is the input.
Does anyone know the reason they don’t have this? (Surely someone before has said: “we could let users delete or edit messages” and it was shot down.. right?)