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by dinkleberg 112 days ago
I'd be surprised to hear that lots of people don't do just this. As soon as the memory features came out I gave them a quick try and quickly turned them off.

I don't want to be held accountable to all of my previous ideas. I want each conversation to start fresh with the context that I provide. If I am exploring some library in one language stack and then I later want to look into something completely different, I don't want the conversation polluted by what it thinks I want based on the previous discussion.

I suppose for those who use it as a companion the memory is a core element. But when used as a tool it gives a significantly worse experience IME.

2 comments

I always use it without logging in ‡, and make a point of starting each fresh chat in a fresh window so its perspective in one conversation isn't tainted by some random line of thinking from before. Can't stand when it makes assumptions about my intentions because I mentioned having kids before, or had talked about a different property or venture or whatever.

‡ I'd tried logging in recently and immediately it started nagging me to upgrade. Went back to using without an account and bizarrely the situation is far better.

It is not necessary to logout for this purpose. It is trivially easy to disable the memory feature permanently. There is an easily available toggle for it.
Right, but when I tried that, I get constant nags to upgrade. If I stay logged out and use it anonymously, it doesn't nag me and seems to work well enough.
Yeah account-level memory is a real mixed bag. I do like Anthropic's project scoped memory, that actually is useful because you get to decide what chats are useful to a given problem space.