Ask HN: How do you keep up with exploding AI chat history?

I have gotten myself into habit of making my default ChatGPT session a temporary chat. This also means I can control what ChatGPT learns about, and so random stuff doesn't cloud up its memory of me the user. Only when I want to discuss something at length or keep a record of it do I start a normal chat.

I keep a few long running chats for important things and then just keep the random questions as individual chats. There's not a lot of structure but it works.

For example at the moment I have 1 long chat about some health stuff, 1 long chat about some bicycle repairs I'm doing, and then the rest are one offs. I rename the long ones (or just remember the name) and they stay at the top because I find them when I need.

I also manage memories assertively. If there's something important that I'm tired of repeating I just ask it to add it to memory and it will do it.

Most of my professional work is done in cursor so it's in a different place to my personal questions. These usually are one chat per feature kind of thing, and start a new one when it gets confused with the enormous context

Find patterns and merge similar-intent inquiries into a single thread.

I used to ask an LLM for executive summaries by pasting an article URL into a fresh conversation each time. Now, I don't open a new thread or even write a follow-up comment on the same thread. Instead, I simply edit the prompt (of a single thread) with the new link.

I just clean up old chats every week. I keep maybe 3–5 that matter. If I need the info again, I’ll just ask ChatGPT — faster than digging through history.