Alyph · Pruning
Prune the dead end. Keep the answer.
A dead-end branch does two kinds of damage: it keeps shaping the AI's answers, and it keeps showing up on your token bill. Pruning removes the branch — the noise and the cost end with it.
The short answer
Pruning deletes a branch from your conversation's context — and from its cost. The answer you liked stays in your main thread; the fourteen messages of fighting it took to get there do not. The fix stays, the fight leaves.
Build a terminal app in Python. Where do I start?
Python.h headers, portaudio, pkg-config. 14 messages.
Fixed. Now the main loop: App, compose(), on_mount. Here’s the skeleton.
What you get
- One click removes the whole branch
- Its context stops shaping future answers immediately
- Its tokens stop being re-billed on every message
- Your main thread keeps only what worked
- The fix comes back to the main thread before you prune
Why dead ends are expensive
AI models don’t remember your chat — they reread it, in full, every time you hit send. A ten-message detour isn’t over when it’s over: it is re-transmitted, and re-billed, with every message you send afterward. And because the model weighs everything it reads, the detour keeps bending your answers.
That’s context pollution. Starting a new chat fixes it by throwing away the good context with the bad. Pruning fixes it surgically: the dead end goes, the rest stays.
The workflow: branch, keep, prune
- Branch before the rabbit hole. The tangent starts isolated by default.
- Bring the answer back. When the branch produces something useful, it returns to the main thread — the fix, the decision, the paragraph.
- Prune the branch. The fight, the false starts, and their token cost disappear in one click.
Prune vs. starting over
In a linear chat, the only escape from a polluted thread is abandoning it — and re-explaining your project in a fresh one. On the canvas, the main thread never held the mess in the first place, so there’s nothing to abandon. You prune branches, not projects.
Questions, answered
Does pruning delete the answer I wanted to keep?
Pruning removes the whole branch, so the pattern is: keep the answer, prune the fight. Take the useful result back to your main thread first — then prune the branch. The main thread ends up holding exactly what worked, and nothing that didn’t.
Does pruning actually save money?
Yes. Every message you send re-transmits the conversation’s context as billed input. A pruned branch is no longer part of that context, so its tokens stop being re-billed from the moment you prune it. Long detours are line items; pruning ends them.
What should I not prune?
Anything you’ll want to reuse — a design you might revisit, research you’ll cite later. If a branch holds decisions rather than detours, keep it. Pruning is for branches you’re done with.
Try pruning on the canvas
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