I really like the new “Branch in New Chat” feature, but I think its current behavior makes it much less useful for long technical conversations.

When I create a branch, I expect it to become a focused conversation starting from that point. However, it appears that the new branch inherits almost the entire working context of the original chat, even when most of that context is unrelated to the new topic.

For users working on long-running projects, this has several downsides:

• The new branch still feels as heavy as the original conversation.
• Unrelated historical context is carried into the branch.
• It reduces the benefit of organizing discussions into separate topics.
• It may unnecessarily consume context window capacity.

I think it would be much more useful if users could choose how much context should be copied into the new branch.

For example:

• Full conversation context (current behavior)
• Context up to the selected message
• Minimal relevant context (AI-generated)
• Selected message only

This would make branching much more powerful for developers, researchers, and anyone working on multiple parallel topics.

Thank you for building this feature. I think a small improvement like this would make it significantly more useful.

Thanks for sharing this idea, @aliexe. I can definitely see why that would be useful, especially for long technical conversations where you want a branch to become a more focused discussion instead of carrying along unrelated history.

Giving users control over how much context is copied, whether that's the full conversation, up to a selected message, AI-generated minimal context, or just the selected message, seems like a thoughtful way to make branching more flexible.

I've passed this along to the team so it can be logged as a feature request. It's a great suggestion, and I appreciate you taking the time to explain both the current limitations and the potential improvements.

-Mark G.