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I often work on documents or content in ChatGPT and I needed a way to refer to previous messages and drafts, and to combine them or pull ideas from them into ne

I often work on documents or content in ChatGPT and I needed a way to refer to previous messages and drafts, and to combine them or pull ideas from them into new drafts or iterations. My first goal was to simply implement message numbering so I could refer to messages by number in the chat. It took a LOT of tuning to make ChatGPT do that reliably. Once I got that working I started taking it further to enable more advanced editing commands on ranges of messages, and automation of tasks with simple command line functions. It saves me a ton of time and a lot of cutting and pasting. Also the ability to tag messages in a chat and then pull them by tag to use for a new draft is useful. Now that I have this working I have also added other features - only available in the GPT version - that are increasingly more powerful and productive for really using ChatGPT to develop content and ideas systematically. It's way better than constantly copying and pasting previous messages into new messages to ask ChatGPT to do stuff with them. Now for example, I simply type "Make //5 longer and combine with //7" to make message 5 longer and merge it with message 7. Big time saver! But there are a lot of other more powerful commands I've built with this, and that others can build as well, for speeding up repetitive tasks in ChatGPT.

airesearcher 3y ago
The other big challenge was to make this whole editor fit into 1500 characters which is the limit for a Custom Instruction. Most of my prompts that I build for work are very large and complicated -- at least many pages long on average - because we are developing intelligent agents with a lot of functionality in them. So I took it as a fun weekend activity to try to pack as much functionality into this EXTREMELY SMALL character limit as I could, refining many many times to make all fit and work reliably. Almost fits on a T-Shirt! I also had to make it work in both GPT 4 and 3.5 (not all of it behaves well in 3.5). I totally geeked out on this for 2 days and had a blast. But what's great is that in the end I got something truly useful (and I think other people who seriously use ChatGPT for content generation will agree).
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Indeed the 1500 limit harkens back to a simpler more fun time in computing where you were packing instructions and clever hacks into a constrained machine. Yeah it looked a lot like a line editor semantic for revision and iteration. The function definition part is the most interesting to my mind tho.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Not sure why you picked // as your special sequence, but ^ might be better. // appears with some regularity in any corpus with programming in it, and is 1 token in tiktoken. ^ is much more rare, and is 1 token in itself as a result. This will likely help recall, but it’ll also give you more characters in your instruction text.
  - airesearcher 3y ago
    Could be a good improvement but ^ is more of a pain to type...
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I imagine it also keeps the context more grounded as you avoid bringing the same redundant text into context again and again through the copy and paste. I often ask it to refer to some anchoring text in a prior response or prompt but providing a specific anchor I’m sure is more robust. This is pretty neat.

airesearcher 3y ago

The other big challenge was to make this whole editor fit into 1500 characters which is the limit for a Custom Instruction. Most of my prompts that I build for work are very large and complicated -- at least many pages long on average - because we are developing intelligent agents with a lot of functionality in them. So I took it as a fun weekend activity to try to pack as much functionality into this EXTREMELY SMALL character limit as I could, refining many many times to make all fit and work reliably. Almost fits on a T-Shirt! I also had to make it work in both GPT 4 and 3.5 (not all of it behaves well in 3.5). I totally geeked out on this for 2 days and had a blast. But what's great is that in the end I got something truly useful (and I think other people who seriously use ChatGPT for content generation will agree).

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Indeed the 1500 limit harkens back to a simpler more fun time in computing where you were packing instructions and clever hacks into a constrained machine. Yeah it looked a lot like a line editor semantic for revision and iteration. The function definition part is the most interesting to my mind tho.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Not sure why you picked // as your special sequence, but ^ might be better. // appears with some regularity in any corpus with programming in it, and is 1 token in tiktoken. ^ is much more rare, and is 1 token in itself as a result. This will likely help recall, but it’ll also give you more characters in your instruction text.
- airesearcher 3y ago
  Could be a good improvement but ^ is more of a pain to type...

fnordpiglet 3y ago

I imagine it also keeps the context more grounded as you avoid bringing the same redundant text into context again and again through the copy and paste. I often ask it to refer to some anchoring text in a prior response or prompt but providing a specific anchor I’m sure is more robust. This is pretty neat.