Editing an Old Message Is ChatGPT's Closest Thing to /compact for Long Project Chats

Ok_Negotiation_2587 · reddit · 2026-09-04

A detailed workflow for manually compacting long ChatGPT project chats: editing a message forks the conversation, so replacing your second message with a consolidated state doc after each validated batch resets context without losing the thread. Key rules: the repo/tests are the source of truth, mark unverified items, keep the plan as message one, and do cold reviews in a fresh chat. Author ran a three-week project in one chat without quality decay, at 2 minutes per batch.

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