[sundarurfriend]

ChatGPT web UI was also like this for the longest time, until a few months ago: all sorts of random UI bugs leading either to data loss or misleading UI state. Interrupting still is very flaky there too. And on the mobile app, if you move away from the app while it's taking time to think, its state would somehow desync from the actual backend thinking state, and get stuck randomly; sometimes restarting the app fixes it, sometimes that chat is that unusable from that point on.

And the UI lack of polish shows up freshly every time a new feature lands too - the "branch in new chat" feature is really finicky still, getting stuck in an unusable state if you twitch your eyebrows at wrong moment.

[gcr]

i basically can't use the ChatGPT app on the subway for these reasons. the moment the websocket connection drops, i have to edit my last message and resubmit it unchanged.

it's like the client, not the server, is responsible for writing to my conversation history or something

[spruce_tips]

it took me a lot of tinkering to get this feeling seamless in my own apps that use the api under the hood. i ended up buffering every token into a redis stream (with a final db save at the end of streaming) and building a mechanism to let clients reconnect to the stream on demand. no websocket necessary.

works great for kicking off a request and closing tab or navigating away to another page in my app to do something.

i dont understand why model providers dont build this resilient token streaming into all of their APIs. would be a great feature

[rishabhaiover]

exactly. they need to bring in spotify level of caching of streaming music that it just works if you're in a subway. Constant availability should be table stakes for them.

[rjzzleep]

I get that the web versions are free, but if you can afford API access, I always recommend using Msty for everything. It's a much better experience.

https://msty.ai/

[p_ing]

> ChatGPT web UI was also like this for the longest time

Copilot Chat has been perfect in this respect. It's currently GPT 5.0, moving to 5.1 over the next month or so, but at least I've never lost an (even old) conversation since those reside in an Exchange mailbox.

[Max-Limelihood]

I lost thousands of conversations I'd had back in the move from "Bing" to "Copilot". Moved straight to Claude and never touched a GPT again.

[Duanemclemore]

I downloaded my archive and completely ended my GPT subscription last week based on some bad computer maintenance advice. Same thing here - using other models, never touching that product again.

[topato]

now I kind of HAVE to know... what was the aforementioned bad advice was?! So mysterious!

[Duanemclemore]

Oh, it was DUMB. I was dumb. I only have myself to blame here. But we all do dumb things sometimes, owning your mistakes keeps you humble, and you asked. So here goes.

I use a modeling software called Rhino on wine on Linux. In the past, there was an incident where I had to copy an obscure dll that couldn't be delivered by wine or winetricks from a working Windows installation to get something to work. I did so and it worked. (As I recall this was a temporary issue, and was patched in the next release of wine.)

I hate the wine standard file picker, it has always been a persistent issue with Rhino3d. So I keep banging my head on trying to get it to either perform better or make a replacement. Every few months I'll get fed up and have a minute to kill, so I'll see if some new approach works. This time, ChatGPT told me to copy two dll's from a working windows installation to the System folder. Having precedent that this can work, I did.

Anyway, it borked startup completely and it took like an hour to recover. What I didn't consider - and I really, really should have - was that these were dll's that were ALREADY IN the system directory, and I was overwriting the good ones with values already reflecting my system with completely foreign ones.

And that's the critical difference - the obscure dll that made the system work that one time was because of something missing. This time was overwriting extant good ones.

But the fact that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success made me very wary of the harm it could cause.

[me-vs-cat]

> ...using other models, never touching that product again.

> ...that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success...

Since you're using other models instead, do you believe they cannot give similarly stupid ideas?

[p_ing]

I'm referring to Copilot Chat. The data resides in your Exchange mailbox. You're referring to the consumer product.