Hi everyone!
I’m a software developer, and I use ChatGPT extensively for programming and technical projects.
One issue I’ve noticed is context window saturation.
From my experience, I’ve been using approximately 250,000 tokens as a reference limit. However, ChatGPT doesn’t provide a clear warning when a conversation is approaching its context limit.
Does anyone else find this frustrating?
When you’re working on complex projects, losing access to important parts of an earlier conversation without a clear warning can be a real problem.
Here’s a small tip for developers:
You can open Chrome Developer Tools (F12 → Network) and inspect the network requests ChatGPT uses to retrieve conversation history.
By examining these requests and using a tokenizer, you can build your own Chrome extension to automatically count the tokens in a conversation and receive warnings before reaching a chosen threshold.
I actually created my own Chrome extension for this purpose.
It monitors the conversation’s token count automatically and warns me when the historical token count approaches my reference limit, giving me time to save important information before continuing in a new chat.
Of course, historical token counts are not necessarily identical to the model’s actual active context usage, but they provide a useful indicator.
I’m not trying to promote anything. I simply wanted to share this idea with other developers who use ChatGPT as much as I do.
**If anyone is interested or curious about the extension I’ve built, feel free to ask
Has anyone else encountered this problem or developed a similar solution?