Scene: I thought AI would get smarter the more we talked. Wrong.

Last Wednesday afternoon, I was rewriting product copy in a coffee shop in Hangzhou. Same AI tool, twenty-plus rounds in — its replies kept getting shorter, more like it was brushing me off. I figured my prompts were the problem. Turns out this is a universal LLM flaw, not me.

What this is, and who's using it

Indie hacker levels.io published a prompt trick: at the start of every new chat, paste a "role-reset" instruction that forces the AI back into deep-thinking mode instead of sliding down an increasingly shallow context. While running his remote SaaS company SaaShip, he fires off hundreds of Claude chats daily — he says "this move saved my workflow."

Short version: stop relying on the AI to "remember context." Force it to reload your goals every time. My friend Xiaoyang, who runs a paid-knowledge course as a solo creator in Shenzhen, copied the method and finally got AI to stop "getting dumber the longer we talk."

Replication cost: $0, 5 minutes, zero technical skill

No paid tool. No code. Steps: open your usual AI chat (start a new conversation), grab levels.io's English prompt, translate it into Chinese for your business, then ask your actual question. First step: grab the original prompt here.

I made this mistake too — I assumed "the longer we chat, the better it knows me." It's actually the opposite. Longer conversations, more drift.

How to use this at your stage

Just starting, no clients yet: Skip for now. If you're only asking AI a few questions a day, you haven't hit context collapse yet. Bookmark this and come back when you're using AI heavily.

1-2 clients already: I'd push you to try this today. If you're editing copy with AI daily, you're right in the "context rot" sweet spot. Five minutes in could save you an afternoon of rewrites.

Scaling up, high content output: Turn that prompt into a template, auto-paste it into every new session. If you run courses, communities, or a personal IP, this is basically a must-have.

Last thing — this isn't magic, it's a habit tweak. But for anyone grinding with AI 2+ hours a day, the difference is real.