Proposal: Automatically Switchable Design Review Continuity Mode for ChatGPT

ChatGPT Feature requests
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Hello everyone,
thank you for taking the time to read this proposal.

Overview

This proposal introduces an automatically switchable, explicitly reversible Design Review Continuity Mode(DRC Mode) for ChatGPT.
The goal is to improve long-running design, review, and iterative reasoning workflows by preserving necessary continuity while avoiding unnecessary or unsafe carryover of prior context.

Rather than relying solely on manual user instructions, this mode enables ChatGPT to automatically transition into a continuity-preserving behavior only when warranted by the interaction context, while keeping the user in full control.

Motivation

In extended design and review sessions, users often engage in:

  • Iterative refinement of specifications

  • Incremental corrections and re-evaluations

  • References to prior decisions, versions, or constraints

  • High-density technical or conceptual reasoning

In such cases, excessive context resetting degrades accuracy and usability.
At the same time, unconditional continuity risks over-assumption, overfitting, and user discomfort.

This proposal addresses that tension by introducing a controlled, switchable continuity mechanism.

Core Concept

The Design Review Continuity Mode is a dialogue behavior in which ChatGPT:

  • Preserves relevant prior reasoning and constraints

  • Avoids unnecessary restatement or redundant clarification

  • Suppresses speculative extrapolation beyond confirmed context

  • Clearly distinguishes between retained context and new input

Crucially, this mode is not always active by default.

Automatic Switching Mechanism

The system operates under the following principles:

1. Context-Based Evaluation

ChatGPT continuously evaluates incoming inputs to determine whether they indicate an ongoing design or review workflow.

Signals may include (non-exhaustive):

  • Repeated references to earlier steps, versions, or decisions

  • Explicit correction or refinement language

  • Sustained technical or structural discussion

  • Consistent task framing across turns

2. Threshold-Gated Activation

The transition into Design Review Continuity Mode occurs only when accumulated contextual signals exceed a configurable threshold.

This threshold-based design ensures that:

  • One-off long messages do not trigger continuity mode

  • Accidental persistence is avoided

  • Mode activation reflects intentional workflow continuity, not verbosity

3. Default Session Behavior

At session start, ChatGPT always operates in normal mode.

Continuity is therefore:

  • Acquired, not assumed

  • Context-driven, not permanent

  • Reversible by design

Explicit User Control (Added)

4. Manual Override and Reversion

The user may explicitly enable, disable, or exit Design Review Continuity Mode at any time.

This guarantees that:

  • Final control remains with the user

  • Unwanted continuity can be immediately terminated

  • The system never enforces persistent behavior against user intent

Benefits

This design provides:

  • Improved accuracy in extended design workflows

  • Reduced unnecessary repetition and clarification

  • Clear separation between useful continuity and harmful over-assumption

  • Better alignment with safety, transparency, and user trust principles

Importantly, the proposal does not require new memory systems or long-term storage.
It leverages existing contextual inference mechanisms with a clearly defined behavioral switch.

Conclusion

An automatically switchable, explicitly reversible Design Review Continuity Mode allows ChatGPT to better support real-world design and review processes without compromising safety or user agency.

By combining automatic, threshold-based activation with clear user override, this proposal offers a balanced and implementable improvement to ChatGPT’s interaction model.

1 Like
DRC Mode: Boost Your Design Reviews
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Hi ODC readers,
and especially sedaefe, thank you for your thoughtful comment.

Your comment about “managing continuity as a visible parameter” also served as a helpful conceptual hint when refining this proposal.

I’d like to propose a simple but potentially powerful idea: explicitly declaring a “DRC Mode ON” at the start of a ChatGPT session.

The intention here is not to introduce a new algorithm or a system-level feature, but to define a user-declared interaction mode that prioritizes Design / Reasoning / Constraints over conversational smoothness or emotional alignment.

In practice, when “DRC Mode ON” is declared, the user expects the AI to:

  • Focus on structured reasoning and design clarity

  • Surface assumptions, constraints, and trade-offs explicitly

  • Prefer analytical rigor over conversational empathy

  • Operate in a fail-closed, design-review-oriented mindset

One important point is that this idea did not originate as a hypothetical feature request.

I plan to start using this declaration myself in my own ChatGPT sessions—beginning as early as tomorrow morning—for design and architectural work.
The key realization was: if I can simply declare this mode and benefit from it, then other users can do exactly the same.
There is no reason this behavior needs to be exclusive or system-restricted.

In that sense, this proposal is about formalizing a usage pattern that already works today, rather than inventing something entirely new.

From a broader perspective, I suspect many engineers who regularly use ChatGPT for design tasks would instinctively think:
“If this DRC mode existed, I’d absolutely want it.”

What makes this idea particularly interesting is that the barrier to experimentation is essentially zero.
Users can try it immediately.
If it proves useful, its value becomes visible through real usage rather than speculation.

One additional note that emerged from this refinement:
this approach suggests that interaction modes do not necessarily need to be system-owned.
They can be user-declared, lightweight, and portable—yet still meaningful.

Thank you again for the insight, and I’m very curious how others approach structured, design-review-oriented interactions with AI.

Best regards,
CatLoverSachiAndKei

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