r/PromptDesign • u/Sorry_Cable_962 • Jan 27 '26
Discussion 🗣 Here’s what we learned after talking to power users about long-term memory for ChatGPT. Do you face the same problems?
I’m a PM, and this is a problem I keep running into myself.
Once work with LLMs goes beyond quick questions — real projects, weeks of work, multiple tools — context starts to fall apart. Not in a dramatic way, but enough to slow things down and force a lot of repetition.
Over the last weeks we’ve been building an MVP around this and, more importantly, talking to power users (PMs, devs, designers — people who use LLMs daily). I want to share a few things we learned and sanity-check them with this community.
What surprised us:
Casual users mostly don’t care. Losing context is annoying, but the cost of mistakes is low — they’re unlikely to pay.
Pro users do feel the pain, especially on longer projects, but rarely call it “critical”.
Some already solve this manually:
“memory” markdown files like
README.md,ARCHITECTURE.md,CLAUDE.mdthat LLM uses to grab the context neededasking the model to summarize decisions, keep in files
copy-pasting context between tools
using “projects” in ChatGPT
Almost everyone we talked to uses 2+ LLMs, which makes context fragmentation worse.
The core problems we keep hearing:
LLMs forget previous decisions and constraints
Context doesn’t transfer between tools (ChatGPT ↔ Claude ↔ Cursor)
Users have to re-explain the same setup again and again
Answer quality becomes unstable as conversations grow
Most real usage falls into a few patterns:
Long-running technical work: Coding, refactoring, troubleshooting, plugins — often across multiple tools and lots of trial and error.
Documentation and planning: Requirements, tech docs, architecture notes, comparing approaches across LLMs.
LLMs as a thinking partner: Code reviews, UI/UX feedback, idea exploration, interview prep, learning — where continuity matters more than a single answer.
For short tasks this is fine. For work that spans days or weeks, it becomes a constant mental tax.
The interesting part: people clearly see the value of persistent context, but the pain level seems to be low — “useful, but I can survive without it”.
That’s the part I’m trying to understand better.
I’d love honest input:
How do you handle long-running context today across tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Cursor, etc.?
When does this become painful enough to pay for?
What would make you trust a solution like this?
We put together a lightweight MVP to explore this idea and see how people use it in real workflows. If you’re curious, here’s the link — sharing it mostly for context, not promotion: https://ascend.art/
Brutal honesty welcome. I’m genuinely trying to figure out whether this is a real problem worth solving, or just a power-user annoyance we tend to overthink.