Why the start of a chat fades
In a long chat, ChatGPT has a lot to work from: every message, every draft, every correction. The instructions you gave at the start are still in there, but they compete with everything that came after. That's why a chat can feel sharp for an hour and then start drifting.
The handoff-summary method
In June 2026, PCWorld recommended a simple fix for ChatGPT forgetting things in long threads: ask for a handoff summary you can paste into a new chat. According to PCWorld, it should cover:
- What you're trying to accomplish.
- The key decisions made so far.
- Anything the AI would get wrong by guessing: the rules and details that aren't obvious.
- The very next step.
And it should be short enough to read in under a minute. Then you open a new chat, paste it in and carry on.
Why a plain summary isn't enough
PCWorld also warns that asking for a tight summary of the conversation "risks losing important nuances". A summary tells you what the chat was about. A handoff tells the next chat how to keep working: the rules, the decisions, where you stopped.
There's one more catch. When you ask ChatGPT for the handoff, it writes it from inside the same long chat that's already losing track. The early rules are exactly what it's most likely to skip. Read its handoff before you use it.
Get the handoff without writing it
Uncook's Handoff reads the whole chat from your browser and writes the handoff for you. On the ChatGPT page, click the Uncook icon and pick Handoff. You get a prompt with your goal, what's decided, the rules you set and where you stopped.
Read it, change what you want, then copy it into a new chat.
Questions people ask
Can't I just turn on ChatGPT's memory? Memory can carry a few facts about you from chat to chat. It doesn't carry the decisions and drafts of one long chat. That's what a handoff is for.
How long should a handoff be? Short. PCWorld suggests something you can read in under a minute. The point is to leave the new chat room to work.
Does it work in Claude or Gemini? Yes. Open a supported ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini chat in desktop Chrome and use the Uncook icon.
Start fresh,
without starting over.
Add to Chrome
We don't keep the conversations you bring. When you click Send to Uncook in the extension window, the extension sends the chat from your tab to our servers, encrypted, for up to 30 minutes, and we delete it as soon as your Uncook page opens it. What Uncook makes from it is kept as a task, for as long as our Privacy page says. Neither your chats nor your tasks are used to train AI models.