Start from the top

I'm currently helping teachers accelerate their learning as the industry adopts AI tools. One of the topics I get to teach is how to navigate the dilemma of when to start a new thread. Threads, or as ChatGPT calls them, New Chats, are designed to house one topic of conversation.

They have memory, which is amazing for retaining context throughout your session -- but if used wrong, result in less-than-ideal outputs and can lead to frustration. Ever tried to fix an image within one thread after ChatGPT takes a funny direction? Start another thread, ya know!?

The idea is useful beyond the teachers I work with, so I'm bringing it here. It also has analogs in day-to-day life, and if you read my writing, you know I love the metaphor.

Concretely, the lesson is to start another thread when you're addressing a new topic, when ChatGPT starts to go a way you hadn't expected (resetting the context) and to stay organized. (I made a short video speaking to it here.)

Abstractly, the lesson is that it's helpful to sometimes "start from the top". To go back to the beginning of an idea and out of the rabbit hole that we sometimes get sucked into. It's not always as easy as the click of a button, but it always helps.

Jeff Crawford begins many of his classes by asking #teachers to draw trees. "Start from the roots with every penstroke," he implores us. The idea is a good one, I hope it's helpful for you.

As we teach teachers, it's one of 4 core ideas on the way to getting real value from AI-based systems--alongside investing in the smarter models, "creating GPTs" (because they're easy and useful), and not being scared to try things that might not work. Hopefully, it's helpful to you even if you're not a teacher.

If you know a teacher who is getting good at this stuff, send them our way at www.chairlift.fun.