Feature Request: Automatic Branching & Thread Organization Inside Projects
First, I want to say that ChatGPT is genuinely one of my favorite apps. I use it a lot, and I especially love the newer Branch in new chat functionality. It solves a real problem: sometimes a conversation reaches a point where you want to explore a completely different direction without losing the original discussion.
But I think this could be taken one step further.
The problem
Long ChatGPT conversations can become very cluttered.
For example, I might start a conversation about a university subject, then ask about one concept, then move to another concept, then work on an assignment, then ask a completely unrelated question.
Everything ends up inside one extremely long thread.
The alternative is manually creating a new chat every time the topic changes, but then I lose the continuity and context of the original conversation.
The current Branch in new chat feature is a great solution to this, but I have to manually decide when and where to branch.
My suggestion: Projects → Topics → Threads
I would love to see Projects evolve into something like this:
University / MBA Project
→ Marketing
-
Thread 1: Diffusion of Innovations
-
Thread 2: Performance Management Systems
-
Thread 3: Assignment discussion
→ HR
-
Thread 1: Recruitment
-
Thread 2: Performance appraisal
-
Thread 3: Case study
→ Research
-
Thread 1: Topic exploration
-
Thread 2: Literature review
-
Thread 3: Research methodology
The important part is that all these threads would still belong to the same Project and therefore retain the relevant Project-level context, files, instructions, and knowledge.
Even better: intelligent automatic branching
Ideally, ChatGPT could recognize when a conversation has substantially moved into a new topic.
For example, imagine I’m having a conversation about Marketing and suddenly start asking several questions about HR.
ChatGPT could say:
“This seems like a new topic. Would you like me to continue in a new thread within this Project?”
Or, optionally, there could be an automatic mode:
Automatically organize substantial topic changes into new threads
The user could turn this on or off.
The new thread wouldn’t start from zero. It could inherit the relevant Project context and perhaps carry over a short summary of the previous discussion when necessary.
Why I think this would be useful
This would give ChatGPT a structure similar to:
Project = the overall subject/context
Thread = a specific conversation/topic within that context
It would solve the current trade-off between:
One giant conversation → lots of context, but increasingly cluttered
vs.
Many separate chats → organized, but context gets fragmented
The ideal solution is to have multiple lightweight threads inside one persistent Project context.
I think this would make ChatGPT feel much more like an organized workspace rather than a collection of increasingly long conversations.
The existing Branch feature is already a great foundation for this. I’m suggesting taking that concept and making it persistent, organized, and optionally intelligent/automatic within Projects.
Thank you for continuing to improve ChatGPT, this is one of those small workflow improvements that I think could make a huge difference for people who use ChatGPT heavily.