Most AI chat apps of frontier model producers still evolve around simple chats with weak organizational features. I know a lot of development is happening, but Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT mostly stick to the–now already relatively old–“chat” concept of AI agents. This is a pity though, since this way they prove to be model developers instead of application developers. Here’s my chat app improvement wishlist.
Some other companies try to step into this black hole of productivity enhancements that AI asks for, but most of them become playgrounds, almost literally, instead of becoming productivity tools. They support so many features that sound relevant that they become redundant.
For me, a chat session is an asset or artifact on its own, when I want to research on a topic I know having chatted about earlier, I will dig up that chat in the list and continue from there, since I know it will retain context and sometimes this context goes exactly into the direction I want to continue on.
For me, a chat session is an asset or artifact on its own
I would wish for being able to handle chats much more flexible: like removing my prompts or questions, or removing the model’s answers, “re-query” a prompt and tag answers with either colors or terms, have chats exported into artifacts which I can move around within the app to use those as context for a new chat or project.
Also, grouping chats should be enhanced. Now most apps have Projects, but not all services support moving chats into Projects or among Projects. That would be a great enhancement. ChatGPT does so now, and I really appreciate it. But sometimes I also have very quick queries that aren’t really chats but more swift Q and A’s, or the result of an iOS workflow/shortcut: in the Share feature of iOS I created a select-text-forward-to-prompt task which I can use in many iOS apps. The downside of this is that it creates new chats in the Claude app. But mostly these are throw away chats which don’t need a long time to live. So, my idea here would be to have something like a bucket of snippets: quick queries which get cleaned up after thirty days or so.
Recently Anthropic introduced stars for Chats and Projects which make it possible to have some extra level of organization, which makes it possible to differentiate between throw away chats and more valuable chats.
Lastly I would be interested in having something like Collections in which I can group projects. As sometimes I have a bigger collection of related topics in which I want to put several projects. Even a Collection could have some form of additional context which will be incorporated in the context of a descending project or chat, so something of a tree-like structure of Projects.
Some of these ideas draw from the Bullet Journal method and Thiago Forte’s Second Brain ideas and would enable better organization of thoughts, ideas and content for the end user. So, Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, I challenge you to progress development on your tools to keep them relevant for your direct users! Or will you remain model developers that excel in LLMs but leave it up to the market to make wrappers around them via APIs? I love Anthropic’s design, it’s very pleasing to the eye, icons are clear, the brand’s color scheme is awesome, I’d like to keep using the Claude apps…!
Bonus
As taken from this iOS support page from Anthropic, here a screenshot from what it looks like in Shortcuts when you create a custom shortcut. This shortcut can be used throughout iOS. The prompt I wrote here is pretty simple, but you could enhance this, even maybe make a shortcut to have a tweet generated by Claude based on an article at hand in the limited amount of 140 characters for example. Or have a shortcut to summarize a selected piece of text or website and have that summary sent by email.
