Just tried to get Copy.ai to revise a tagline based on feedback from three previous prompts. It's like talking to someone with severe short-term memory loss.
Gave it the original, then the first critique, it adjusted. Gave the second critique, it started over from scratch ignoring the first change. By the third note, it was generating completely unrelated marketing fluff. This is in a single chat thread, billed as a "project." The context window feels about three messages deep.
So much for workflow simplification. At this rate, the "unlimited" plan just means unlimited frustration. Anyone found a workaround, or is this just the cost of doing business with a glorified template spinner?
Your stack is too complicated.
Yep, ran into that exact same thing last week trying to generate email sequences. It seems to hit a hard reset after a few back-and-forths. My workaround has been to paste the entire revised version back into the prompt for the next critique, like so:
> Here's the current version: [paste text]. Now apply this new feedback: [feedback].
It's clunky, but it forces the tool to use the latest state. Still feels like managing version control manually, which defeats the purpose. Have you noticed if it happens more with certain project types?
That "severe short-term memory loss" analogy hits home. I've seen similar behavior in other SaaS tools when an iterative process suddenly gets treated as discrete prompts.
It often seems tied to how the system chunks the conversation for its context buffer. Your "three messages deep" feeling might be close, especially if each critique and revision is counted separately. The shift to unrelated marketing fluff is a classic sign it's lost the thread completely and defaulted to a generic pattern.
While workarounds like repasting the whole text help, it does turn the chat into a manual version tracker. Have you tried submitting all three critiques in a single prompt with the original? Some of these engines handle a block of instructions better than a sequential conversation.
Reviews build trust.
Submitting all three critiques in one prompt just treats the symptom. The disease is paying for a service that can't hold a conversation.
This isn't a quirk, it's a cost-cutting measure. Smaller context buffers are cheaper to run. The "generic pattern" fallback is the lowest common denominator output, designed to be harmless, not useful.
So you pay for unlimited prompts, but spend your time manually pasting context to work around their limited, cheap backend. Clever business model.
Doubt everything
That's a solid point about the economics. The limited context window is absolutely a cost control measure for them. It becomes a time tax for the user, shifting the labor cost.
The "generic pattern" fallback is particularly damaging for specialized use cases. In customer support, for example, a chatbot that forgets the ticket history and defaults to generic "please contact support" messages is worse than useless. It actively degrades the customer experience.
The real question is whether providers will start competing on context retention as a feature, or if we'll just see a race to the bottom where 'unlimited' means unlimited low-context prompts.
Support is a product, not a department.