As a long-form ChatGPT user, I frequently hit the token limit within a single chat, especially when working on creative writing, worldbuilding, or iterative projects. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to delete individual messages — even outdated or redundant ones — to free up token space. This results in the need to start over in a new chat, breaking continuity and forcing manual copy-pasting of important context from earlier conversations.
I’d like to request the following features, all of which would dramatically improve workflow and usability for power users like myself:
- Delete a single message and its associated reply.
- Delete a message and all subsequent messages (“cut from here down”).
- An indicator of how much of the current conversation is taking up the active context window (tokens).
- A way to collapse or summarize earlier messages to preserve context while trimming token cost.
These features wouldn’t just improve efficiency — they’d remove major pain points for people using ChatGPT as a serious creative or productivity tool. Right now, it’s frustrating to lose critical context simply because we can’t curate our own message history.
This is especially frustrating because glitches sometimes do remove user messages without warning (which in the past few days has happened to me over a dozen times), causing the model replies before and after that message to merge together into one message — proving the system can alter conversation history, just not in a way the user controls. Giving users control over this process would make the platform far more useful and respectful of our time and work.
Thanks for considering this request. I believe implementing these tools would empower a wide segment of your dedicated user base. I love the platform and just want to see it become more functional for people doing deep, ongoing projects.