Paste or attach? Getting long notes into a chatbot
A week of slides and readings adds up to a lot of text, and chatbots don't always take all of it in.
Why long pastes go wrong
There are two limits. One is how long a single message can be. Paste too much and the chatbot may cut it off or refuse it. The other is how much the whole conversation can hold, usually called the context window. Once that fills up, the earliest material starts to slip. Free plans get less room than paid ones, and the exact numbers keep changing, so I won't list them here.
The annoying part is that the chatbot almost never tells you it missed something. It answers from whatever it got, and the answer looks fine.
Check what it read
After you send your notes, ask it two things:
- "List every Source heading you can see."
- "What's the last sentence of the final Source section?"
If a file is missing from the list, or the last sentence doesn't match your notes, something got dropped.
Small batches: paste
If it's only a couple of files, like one lecture and its reading, Copy for AI and paste is the fastest way. You can scroll up and see exactly what you sent.
Big batches: attach the .md file
Once it's more than that, press Download .md and attach the file instead. Most chatbots handle attachments separately from what you type and will take a lot more text that way. It's a plain text file, so you can open it in Notepad or your notes app if you want to read through it or cut parts out first.
Still too much?
A few things you can try:
- Do one lecture at a time. Convert the slides and reading for a single topic instead of the whole week.
- Cut what you won't study. Reference lists and appendices take up a lot of space and rarely matter, so delete them from the .md file before sending it.
- Send it in parts. Every file in the document starts with a
# Source:heading, which gives you an easy place to cut. Warn the chatbot first, something like: "I'm sending my notes in three parts. Don't answer until I say done."
New week, new chat
A conversation that's still holding last week's notes has less room for this week's, and the answers can start mixing courses together. Open a new chat for each topic.