Two paths? Take both – 3 ChatGPT branching tips.
Why settle for one answer when you can branch out?
OpenAI just released a long-awaited feature: the ability to branch a conversation.
In any existing or new chat, and on any message from ChatGPT, press the three dot menu and you'll see "branch in new chat." It will duplicate the conversation history (up to and including the message you selected) in a separate tab. Now, you've forked two branches to keep on using!
I'd bet 99.9% of people won't use this feature. Let's be part of the 0.1%.
3 uses that build on each other: hold trunks, A/B test, and use checkpoints!
1 - Hold on to a 'trunk' conversation
Or: A new way to hoard browser tabs and bookmarks
For the past few months, any time there's new data on inflation or jobs, I've been feeding it to GPT-5 Pro and asking it what it would do if it were Jerome Powell -- increase Fed rates, decrease, or hold steady?
I keep going back to the same conversation because it already has all the juicy progress -- past data, past analysis it did, etc. It's accumulating context!
But... I never really ask smaller questions or deviate from the main topic inside that chat because I don't want to "pollute" the context window.
In other words, if I suddenly had too long of a conversation with it about how we could change measurement of unemployment in the US, by the time I came back with the next jobs report, it'd have to "re-orient." We went on a tangent, and the relevant context is pushed further back in conversation history. This is context drift.
Well, this morning, I went back to my trunk and fed it the latest job numbers. Then, I branched a separate conversation to talk about unemployment measurement.
Boom, I still get to go back to the original copy -- the "trunk conversation" -- whenever I want to, but I can spawn as many of these isolated sub-threads as I want, and I'm essentially bringing along a clean "pre-prompt" of the accumulated conversation so far.
Pro-tip #1: bookmark trunks in your browser if you expect to go back to them often, and/or rename the chats from the sidebar with a [TRUNK] label!
2 - Run parallel, isolated A/B conversations
Or: Two paths diverged in a yellow wood, and I could travel both
Let's imagine you're a marketing manager at Uber talking to ChatGPT about the launch of a new safety feature. You're 7 or 8 turns into the conversation talking about the product and your budget -- you're ready to talk about creative strategy and positioning.
But you know your messaging always has two audiences: the driver and the rider. And it's the constant challenge in your job that they are almost never aligned, either in their incentives or instinctual reactions to new announcements.
You could ask ChatGPT to help you with both in that conversation, either at the same time or one after the other. But if you're really trying to maximize the individual consideration for each population, it isn't ideal.
If you talk to ChatGPT about drivers first and come up with a campaign that tells them this is about their safety, then talk in that same chat window about riders, there'll be a lot about driver safety as the conversation and context history.
That isn't always a bad thing, but in this case, it means you aren't maximizing the appeal of the message to two very distinct audiences.
Instead, take your trunk context and split it into two chats. Talk about drivers in one -- "let's optimize messaging and strategy purely for drivers," and riders in the other. Boom: two conversations optimized entirely for each audience, without even a slight penalty for mixing topics and incentives.
Pro-tip #2: after you've had two parallel conversations → bring one back to the other (or start a third) → ask for a consolidation!
"Hey, here's what we've come up with for riders -- now, let's talk about the umbrella campaign, and messaging we should synthesize between riders and drivers."
Pro-tip #3: treat parallel conversations like a Team of Rivals (where is Doris Kearns Goodwin nowadays?) -- if you're seeking something like career advice or dealing with a hard scenario, start the conversation with your initial context, then have a panel of branches that take on different personas (act as my mentor, act as my therapist, etc.) to give you different flavors of advice.
3 - Use branches to restore prior checkpoints
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love version control
Look, I'm not gonna lie to you. I've been saving the best for last. Engineers, you know where this is going.
Let's say you're talking to ChatGPT about some business data. You're 30 minutes in, and you suddenly realize… you mistyped some numbers halfway through!
You could just tell ChatGPT about the correct data, but it’d have to recalculate a bunch of numbers, would struggle to know what's what, and you're in for a headache.
You could edit the message with the bad data and resend it, but that would delete all of the conversation that comes after it. This would be rewriting the path moving forward, which isn't great -- because even though some stuff is wrong, you and your AI friend have had some rad ideas you don't want to lose or stop talking about.
Branching the checkpoint allows you to instead preserve both the "infected" path and have a clean restart with a partial trunk with only the reliable context. Magic!
Warning #1: you might think… “I do this already, I just copy paste conversations into a new window when I need to fix something!” For reasons I’ll explain in a future newsletter, don’t do this unless you have to – branches are a far better solution.
Pro-tip #5: be like Marty McFly and go Back to the Future – when you’ve restored a previous checkpoint in a long conversation to correct some misinfo, you don’t have to re-have all of the same conversation. Your “infected” chat presumably had some good stuff – context, new ideas, etc. Mention all of that in your next message! Fast-forward your progress back to where you were.
Here’s what made this click for my Chief of Staff, Katie:
ok so we have a chat with chatgpt
we go back and forth 9 times
we made an error at msg 4
so we branch at msg 3 to remove the error
but msg 7 and 8 had some good ideas
so if we’re the user
copy paste those good ideas
into the new fork
because it only has msgs 1 to 3
so bring along the good progress
One quick note -- don't branch when you've got compounding work:
When diverse information being included in a chat gives you compounding benefits, don't branch -- stay in it! (Unless you're an engineer going back and forth w/ code, that's nuanced.)
As an example, ChatGPT benefits from seeing you react to ideas if you're in a brainstorm -- unless you're trying to Men-in-Black it and erase its memory for a reason, letting it see its past ideas and your feedback = better next set of ideas.
Alright, that's all for now -- gotta make like a tree and branch off into doing something else. I'll see you on Sunday, when I'll send everyone something they might want to try to build their AI muscle -- because AI is still awesome on the weekends.
Enjoyed this one? Throw this branch at a friend —
Yours, forever and always,
Sherveen