It is hit or miss for me when I ask it to just show the changes. But I do wonder if it is more beneficial (albeit harder for us to parse) for it to keep posting the whole source code so it is always in context. If it just works on the little update sections, it could lose context of things that are already written in the code.
However as the context windows increase, I suppose this will be less of an issue.
This is absolutely correct. I'm considering removing that part of my pre-prompt because it's flaky and loses context when the conversation falls out of the window.
I find myself restarting conversations a lot as they get too long.
It would be very useful to me if I could have something like a conversation context tree where I could branch off various threads in order to maintain the "main context trunk" of a conversation but on a new branch. This would allow you to have "sidebar" conversations that veer off topic.
When this happens in the ChatGPT UI I tend to scroll all the way back up to the input which steered the conversation (in a different but useful direction), I then edit that input which lobs off the off-topic branch and continues from the main context trunk.
However as the context windows increase, I suppose this will be less of an issue.