Comment by ogyousef
1 day ago
3 Years in and we still dont have a useable chat fork in any of the major LLM chatbots providers.
Seems like the only way to explore differnt outcomes is by editing messages and losing whatever was there before the edit.
Very annoying and I dont understand why they all refuse to implement such a simple feature.
Chatgpt has this baked in, as you can revert branches after editing, they just dont make it easy to traverse.
This chrome extension used to work to allow you to traverse the tree: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chatgpt-conversatio...
I copied it a while ago and maintain my own version but it isnt on the store, just for personal use.
I assume they dont implement it because it is such a niche user that wants this and so isnt worth the UI distraction
>they just dont make it easy to traverse
I needed to pull some detail from a large chat with many branches and regenerations the other day. I remembered enough context that I had no problem using search and finding the exact message I needed.
And then I clicked on it and arrived at the bottom of the last message in final branch of the tree. From there, you scroll up one message, hover to check if there are variants, and recursively explore branches as they arise.
I'd love to have a way to view the tree and I'd settle for a functional search.
Do you have your version up on github?
ChatGPT Plus has that (used to be in the free tier too). You can toggle between versions for each of your messages with little left-right arrows.
Google AI Studio allows you to branch from a point in any conversation
This isn't quite the same as being able to edit an earlier post without discarding the subsequent ones, creating a context where the meaning of subsequent messages could be interpreted quite differently and leading to different responses later down the chain.
Ideally I'd like to be able to edit both my replies and the responses at any point like a linear document in managing an ongoing context.
But that's exactly what you can do with AI studio. You can edit any prior messages (then either just saving them at their place in the chat or rerunning them) and you can edit any response of the LLM. Also you can rerun queries within any part of the conversation without the following part of the conversation being deleted or branched
1 reply →
Cherry Studio can do that, allows you to edit both your own and the model responses, but it requires API access.
Yeah, I think this is the best version of the branching interface I've seen.
It is unfortunate that pretty basic "save/load" functionality is still spotty and underdocumented, seems pretty critical.
I use gptel and a folder full of markdown with some light automation to get an adequate approximation of this, but it really should be built in (it would be more efficient for the vendors as well, tons of cache optimization opportunitirs).
This why I use a locally hosted LibreChat. It doesn't having merging though, which would be tricky, and probably require summarization.
I would also really like to see a mode that colors by top-n "next best" ratio, or something similar.
Kagi Assistant and Claude Code both have chat forking that works how you want.
I guess you mean normal Claude? What really annoys me with it is that when you attach a document you can't delete it in a branch, so you have to rerun the previous message so that its gone
No, claude code. Double tap ESC.
1 reply →
I use https://chatwise.app/ and it has this in the form of "start new chat from here" on messages
DeepSeek.com has it. You just edit a previous question and the old conversation is stored and can be resumed.
Copilot in vscode has checkpoints now which are similar
They let you rollback to the previous conversation state
> why they all refuse to implement such a simple feature
Because it would let you peek behind the smoke and mirrors.
Why do you think there's a randomized seed you can't touch?
Maybe this suggests it's not such a simple feature?
A perusal of the source code of, say, Ollama -- or the agentic harnesses of Crush / OpenCode -- will convince you that yes, this should be an extremely a simple feature (management of contexts are part and parcel).
Also, these companies have the most advanced agentic coding systems on the planet. It should be able to fucking implement tree-like chat ...
LM Studio has this feature for local models and it works just fine.
If the client supports chat history, that you can resume a conversation, it has everything required, and it's literally just a chat history organization problem, at that point.
Is it simple? Maintaining context seems extremely difficult with LLMs.