I use ChatGPT heavily for long-form writing and very long conversations, and recently two changes have made that workflow significantly worse for me.
The first issue is chat search/navigation.
When I search for an older message inside a long conversation and jump to that result, the conversation does not always behave as expected afterward. In some cases, only the earlier branch remains visible below the search result, while later parts of the conversation appear to be missing until I manually scroll or navigate around.
For a conversation with hundreds of messages, this makes search feel unreliable.
The whole point of search is to quickly jump back to an older part of a conversation and then continue browsing normally from there. If searching disrupts or hides the later conversation structure, it becomes difficult to use search as a navigation tool for long-running projects.
The second issue is Writing Block editing on desktop web.
I remember Writing Blocks previously having an Edit control near the upper-left area of the block. I could use it to ask ChatGPT to revise the existing Writing Block itself.
That was extremely useful because the workflow looked like this:
Writing Block A
→ Edit
→ “Make these lines bold” / “Combine repetitive short sentences” / etc.
→ Writing Block A is updated in place
The edit did not require me to create another normal conversation branch just to revise the document.
Now, on desktop web, that Edit control appears to be gone.
If I select text in a Writing Block and ask ChatGPT to modify it, the selected text is instead attached to the normal chat composer. Sending the instruction creates:
Writing Block A
→ New user message asking for a revision
→ New assistant response
→ Writing Block A-2
Even opening the full-screen editor does not solve this. Selecting text and giving an AI editing instruction still results in another conversation message and another assistant response.
This defeats one of the main benefits I expected from a Writing Block editor.
For long-form fiction, I may make many small revisions:
- Fix paragraph structure
- Merge repetitive short sentences
- Change formatting
- Adjust dialogue
- Rewrite one section without changing the rest
If every revision adds another user message and another assistant response, the conversation quickly fills with A, A-2, A-3, A-4, etc.
That is not document editing. It is effectively just using the selected text as context for another chat prompt.
What makes this especially confusing is that in-place editing still appears to work differently on mobile. This creates inconsistent behavior between platforms.
For users who primarily write on desktop, “just use mobile for editing” is not a reasonable workflow. Long-form writing is exactly the kind of task where desktop, keyboard, and large-screen editing matter most.
Why these two issues matter together
Both changes affect the same type of user: people who maintain long conversations and long documents over time.
Previously, ChatGPT was useful not only for generating text, but also for:
- navigating large conversation histories,
- finding earlier decisions or passages,
- revising existing long-form content without constantly duplicating it.
Now, chat search feels less dependable for navigating old conversations, while Writing Block editing on desktop appears to create more conversation history instead of reducing it.
That makes long-running projects harder to manage from both directions.
Expected behavior
For chat search:
Search result → jump to that message → retain normal access to the entire conversation and all later branches/messages
For Writing Blocks:
Writing Block A → AI edit → update Writing Block A in place → retain previous revision through Undo / version history
AI-assisted editing should not require creating a new normal conversation turn every time.
Request
Please consider restoring or reintroducing true in-place AI editing for Writing Blocks on desktop web, and making the behavior consistent with mobile.
I would also appreciate improvements to chat search/navigation so that jumping to an older message does not disrupt access to the rest of a long conversation.
These may look like separate UI issues, but together they significantly reduce the usability of ChatGPT for long-form writing and long-running project conversations.