Yeah I start a new session to mitigate this. Don’t keep hammering away - close the current chat/session whatever and restate the problem carefully in a new one.
I've had great luck with asking the current session to "summarize our goals, conversation, and other relevant details like git commits to this point in a compact but technically precise way that lets a new LLM pick up where we're leaving off".
The new session throws away whatever behind-the-scenes context was causing problems, but the prepared prompt gets the new session up and running more quickly especially if picking up in the middle of a piece of work that's already in progress.
Wow, I had useless results asking “please summarize important points of the discussion” from ChatGPT. It just doesn’t understand what’s important, and instead of highlighting pivoting moments of the conversation it produce a high level introduction for a non-practitioner.
Honestly, I just type out something by hand that is roughly like what I quoted above - I'm not big on keeping prompt libraries.
I think the important part is to give it (in my case, these days "it" is gpt-5-codex) a target persona, just like giving it a specific problem instead of asking it to be clever or creative. I've never asked it for a summary of a long conversation without the context of why I want the summary and who the intended audience is, but I have to imagine that helps it frame its output.
There should be a simple button that allows you refine the context. A fresh LLM could generate a new context from the input and outputs of the chat history, then another fresh LLM can start over with that context.
You are saying “fresh LLM” but really I think you’re referring to a curated context. The existing coding agents have mechanisms to do this. Saving context to a file. Editing the file. Clearing all context except for the file. It’s sort of clunky now but it will get better and slicker.
The new session throws away whatever behind-the-scenes context was causing problems, but the prepared prompt gets the new session up and running more quickly especially if picking up in the middle of a piece of work that's already in progress.