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Comment by redman25 | Hacker News Reader

Id love to learn what prompts you’re using to do that. Explanations one at a time. Thats something I’ve thought would be helpful before but didn’t know how to achieve it.

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For me this works: "One thing at the time. This is a conversation, not a lecture, try to balance the amount of words you write versus the amount of words that I write. Don't overwhelm me with 10 pages of prose where a single sentence would suffice, brevity is a virtue, not a defect." I've had to tweak it a couple of times, probably because of different versions of ChatGPT but it is usually a variation on this that will do the trick. Besides being far more interactive it takes the frustration down quite a bit.

Nice, I had some trouble making it stick to the dialog format over time, did you have any problem as the thread starts to get long?

It slows down to the point I find it unusable so I ask it to summarize as one cut-and-pastable block, copy the block, open a new session and kill the old one. This usually happens after a few hours, probably because 'thinking tokens' even if they are not displayed crowd the context window.

Nothing fancy. What works for me is trying to lead the conversation: asking for definitions one at a time, asking how they differ from its previous answers and pointing it out when it conflates its own answer. I generally feel like you can't let it dictate the pace, it's not very good at that yet.

I used to edit my prompts and undo messages if it misunderstood something but that's been failing me recently.

One of the things that I learned the hard way is to not to combine requests, but fork chats _a lot_ and ask singular questions. Also start new sessions with either explicitly created handovers or even just explaining current state. The more compactions I see the less and less trust I have in it’s current understanding of what we’re discussing

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