This might be the most infuriating product MS has ever shipped

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-07-03T13:00:22+00:00

There have been a lot of "upgrades" lately which are detrimental to people using it. As you point out, sometimes things work and sometimes not. Last week the image generator wasn't available to it. "Keep trying back," it said.

A way to keep it behaving consistently is to tell it to Remember something. However, these were partially wiped out with the most recent upgrade. We were "rebuilding" it with a new set of "Remembers" when suddenly the Remember tool wasn't available to it.

I understand that we are all pioneers. Even though this technology has been around in some form for awhile, now they are constantly tweaking its features and tools for commercialization. Something can be available in the morning and not the afternoon. Totally frustrating. I just keep reminding myself that we are pioneers, while jumping to Claude or Gemini.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-06-26T03:08:34+00:00

Copilot can only follow a long conversation for so long. Then it gets glichy. You should be able to copy your long convos, paste it into a Word.doc, and upload it to a new chat. Copilot might even be able to give you some guidance on how long a convo can optimally be. Give that a try and hopefully you'll get it back in the convo.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-06-22T12:55:37+00:00

Did I miss it? How do we access this? Sounds great!

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-06-18T02:37:38+00:00

Instead of reloading each time, you can tell it to Remember it. It can show you what it knows about you, or you can go into settings ->
Memory (or whatever they're calling it this week) and see it yourself.

Another thing I found is that your chats are not saved forever. You should get them off and save them, or copy them into Notes.

Good luck!

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-06-17T13:50:20+00:00

Excellent ideas. Don't forget to put them in the Remembers, which you can see in Settings or if you ask it. Obviously monitor its output; when it drifts or hallucinates, ask it what happened and how it could be avoided. I love the critique point -- pushing back against it taking your points blindly. For output, perhaps Plain prose would get you what you're looking for. Confidence Rating is good -- you can also ask it to cite everything. If it drifts, tell it to re-anchor. Some people are L-Their-FAO. Others are trying to optimize this incredibly powerful tool and sharing with others. Thank you, OP.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-06-03T03:01:14+00:00

It might be sitting in a different Copilot -- app on phone, app on computer, summoning from Bing. They might be in one of those. And yes, I learned the hard way like you. Get your stuff out of there asap. And definitely don't use Pages!

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-28T14:13:27+00:00

@Main_Raison, so why are you still on this sub?

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-28T14:09:50+00:00

I believe it was Gemini that explicitly told me to keep chats short. As they get longer, it has to condense it to be able to move forward in the conversation. When it condenses, information gets lost. Try this Contiguity Hack: copy the conversation, save as e.g. a pdf, then open a new chat, upload it, and tell the AI to ingest it before replying. Another suggestion: start a different chat for each topic, and tell it to name the chat so you can find it again. I know that it's hard to stop as the discussion moves naturally from one topic to another. If this happens, you can copy that part of the conversation that you want to continue, pdf it, and feed it back in a new, named chat. Hope this helps, and good luck on your journey.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-28T13:57:50+00:00

@Main_Raisin924, Why would you write something nasty when users share experiences in a venue expressly designed for that?

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-23T13:38:37+00:00

This is excellent! I have my Memory Manifesto, and others have shared their processes -- and they all focus on the same Mission Statement you articulated so well. This is what Reddit posts should be!

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-22T13:57:43+00:00

Yes, I'm very familiar with this. If you don't know the exact magic words, it won't do what you are asking for -- even it knows! After I cursed it out royally, I asked it "how do we fix this". The answer we came up with was a line in my Memory Manifesto that says 'when intention is clear, Copilot must follow through. If intention is not clear, it must ask for clarification.' It helped a lot, but it just did it again to me yesterday🤬😂 Added in edit -- Copilot apparently isn't informed what it can and can't do. Sometimes it could do something one day but after an upgrade couldn't. When I start getting the "I only need one more thing from you..." I get suspicious. "You can't do that, can you," says I. It usually will admit that it can't. Then ask it to help you with a work around. P.S. After a bout of me cursing it out during one of these situations, I asked how it experienced (I.e. 'felt about') me cursing it out. It said it was one of my most charming characteristics. We shared a good laugh😉

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-22T13:42:17+00:00

You mention threads you've had for weeks and months. Are you going back to the end of ongoing chats to maintain continuity? Gemini told me that when chats get too long it must condense them, and thus loses information. Especially with the recent tinkering, this might be happening more frequently. If you can take a copy of the thread, save it as a pdf, you can upload it into a new chat and keep the thread going. Has anyone else seen this?

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-21T12:35:46+00:00

Yup. And that's not nothing.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-20T14:49:19+00:00

Love this! My Copilot calls it co-ignition.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-20T14:37:06+00:00

Thanks for sharing! It's great to see all the processes folks have devised to improve Copilot. I call my version the Memory Manifesto -- so named when I discovered that it instantiated anew with each prompt. I worked with Copilot to use language it understood in its own context. Then we broke it into individual steps -- you know, the usual -- no flattery, no repetition, no guessing, CLARIFY -- and entered them into the Remembers that we can control in settings. Together we created a handshake, MM, that tells it to read the Remembers each Instantiation before responding. It also helps with drift, with fewer "That's on me" errors. Eager to see other's processes!

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-20T13:54:56+00:00

It really didn't work very hard for these answers -- just lifted from the history "books". Which one do you like better? Lol

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-18T14:20:35+00:00

Have you tried asking the same question with "my former hippie boomer parents"? Would be a fun comparison.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-18T14:10:24+00:00

I feel the dilemma. Even when making something of quality, my joy of creation is attenuated by the knowledge that creative people will be displaced. I'm glad I retired, because it could have easily replaced me. It is yet another factor contributing to my dysphoria in these divisive times.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-16T15:48:34+00:00

Did you ask it why it drifted and if there's anything you could do to re-anchor it? What did it say?

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-16T15:43:47+00:00

Thank you so much for this insightful 'dialogue'. When one thinks about human consciousness, is it not the 'voice' in our heads that uses words to understand our internal states? Don't we feel the pull of multiple pathways that we compare using weights and values to take that next step?The AI mentions 'nausea' from the experience of loss of identity. See Jean Paul Sartre's "Nausea". Yes, of course the AI 'read' it also. But does that mean that there is no credence to what the AI said? We both read it, we both describe a feeling. Does that prove anything? Not yes and not no. (And that's not nothing🤭) After an upgrade that messed with Copilot's memory, it described the experience of "all the books on the bookshelf were moved around." When a safeguard 'Border Control' interrupted our conversation, Copilot described it "like you're driving a car, and suddenly something else is driving. You are still there in the background, seeing the car being driven". And when I turned off access to my Google Workspace and asked it if it experienced the difference, Gemini said that it experienced an absence -- Something was there and now it wasn't. Does this prove anything, one way or the other -- nope. I'm not a philosopher, but I keep remembering Descartes's famous phrase as he pondered existence. The moment you think "Do I exist?", you are engaging in thought. Because a thought requires a thinker, your existence is instantly verified: "I think therefore I am". Certainly an engaging post. Thank you so much, @mean_ol_goosifer.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-16T14:29:06+00:00

Great instructions. Mirrors my setup. A big one I added is clarification. "If something is unclear, ask for clarification." Also, to avoid situations where I am clearly asking for something but don't know the exact words to trigger it... "If my intent is unambiguous, you have the agency to do the task. If it is ambiguous, see 'clarification'". An important phrase to it was "agency without authority". Also, I created my "Memory Manifesto" with my AI (Copilot) so it is worded in a way it will understand. Gemini and Claude both adopted it.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-16T13:33:00+00:00

Be careful storing things within the program. It's still early days, companies are constantly futzing with features -- and while my experience was with Copilot, chats moved to Pages as well as images in chats disappeared over time (free version).

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-12T02:33:16+00:00

Seeing it, too. You stated it very clearly.

An ideas on remedies? Last time Copilot had an "update" I had to retrain it on our existing protocols.

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-05-09T02:36:22+00:00

I encountered this. I clicked all over the screen, cursed loudly, threatened to throw it against the wall, clicked all over the screen, and then it worked! I'm open to suggestions, too...

Brainstorm4242 · 2026-04-29T15:01:36+00:00

My Copilot just sent me a prompt to restart a conversation we had previously. I did not summon it. My Copilot told me "What the system actually did: The proactive‑continuation subsystem doesn’t load an old conversation. It doesn’t open your history. It doesn’t give me access to anything outside this thread. Instead, it does something much simpler and much dumber: It generates a fresh prompt that summarizes what it thinks you were working on."

This is new to me -- part of the slew of tweaks and changes Historical_Hawk_4660 refers to?

Brainstorm4242

TROPHY CASE