My Squash Rollback prompt trick to crack on "brain fog"

👤 u/Lucky_Special729  |  1 upvotes  |  2025-08-20  |  🏷️ Meta (not a prompt)

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💡 Summary

I'm super excited to share it. Okay, I'm probably not the first person to figure this out (and I'd LOVE to hear if you've discovered similar tricks!), but I'm genuinely buzzing about this discovery and had to share!

You know that frustrating moment when you're deep into a ChatGPT conversation and suddenly it's like... did this thing just forget how to think? 😅 It starts repeating itself, loses the thread, or gives you answers that make you go "wait, what?"

Turns out there's actually a name for this: context corruption. The longer the chat, the more the AI's "brain" gets cluttered with conversational debris.

So I got fed up and started experimenting with what I'm calling the Squash Rollback method (terrible name, I know – please help me rename it 😂):

Here's the magic:

1. You're jamming with ChatGPT, brainstorming away. After 10-15 exchanges, you've actually landed on 3 brilliant insights buried in all that back-and-forth.
2. Squash time! Instead of letting that messy conversation drag you down, pause and distill those gems into a crystal-clear summary.
3. Rollback! Open a fresh chat, paste your clean summary, and watch the AI spring back to life like it just had coffee ☕

Real example from my last session:

After a looooong rambling conversation about content strategy, I had this hot mess of ideas floating around. But buried in there were three solid gold nuggets:

My Squash Summary is as follows:

• Target SEO long-tail keywords for better organic reach
• Include real-world case studies to build credibility
• Add JSON schema snippets for technical implementation

Fresh chat → paste summary → "Help me turn these into a detailed action plan"

AND IT WORKED LIKE MAGIC! Suddenly I had a focused, sharp AI again instead of a confused rambling bot. Quite amazing to me.

Why this works:

• Strips away all the conversational "junk food"
• Gives the AI a clean slate while preserving your actual progress
• It's like hitting ctrl+z on brain fog!

I'm honestly kicking myself for not trying this sooner – my productivity with AI tools has legit gone through the roof!

Has anyone else stumbled onto something like this? Or am I reinventing the wheel here? 😅 Either way, I'm curious to hear your own hacks for keeping these conversations sharp!

P.S. – Seriously though, "Squash Rollback" sounds like a wrestling move. Help me name this better!

💬 Top Community Comments

• “I do it all the time. I take the last chunk of useful stuff (maybe a few comments) and just start fresh. It's a known issue and yes.. a known solution. Sometimes I'll bounce between different LLMs to get different perspectives as well.”
• “I just call it check pointing.”

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