Mastering Hidden Messages: Optimize Context and Costs

Unlock Advanced Context Control with Hidden Messages

The "Hide Message" feature is a powerful and unique tool within allmates.ai designed to give you granular control over the information your Mates use during conversations. Unlike deleting, hiding a message makes it invisible to Mates while keeping it fully visible to all human participants. This allows you to streamline conversations for AI, optimize costs, and maintain a complete, auditable history for your team.

How to Hide and Unhide Messages

Using the feature is simple:

1. Hover: Move your mouse cursor over the message you want to hide.

2. Click Hide: Click the eye icon (👁️) in the floating action palette that appears. The icon will change to a crossed-out eye, and the message background might subtly change to indicate it's hidden from Mates.

3. Unhide: To make the message visible to Mates again, simply hover over the hidden message and click the crossed-out eye icon.

Why Use Hidden Messages? Key Benefits

• Precise Context Control: Prevent Mates from being influenced by outdated information, irrelevant tangents, or intermediate steps, ensuring they focus only on the most pertinent parts of the conversation.

• Token Optimization: By excluding messages from the Mate's input, you reduce the number of "Tokens In" processed by the language model. This can lead to significant cost savings, especially in long or complex conversations.

• Clean Conversation Flow for AI: Keep the primary thread tidy and focused for Mates, leading to more accurate and relevant responses, without cluttering their context window.

• Preserve Full Audit Trail: Unlike deletion, hiding messages maintains the complete conversation history for human review, crucial for understanding the flow, tracking decisions, or meeting audit requirements.

Practical Use Cases & Examples

Here are several scenarios where the "Hide Message" feature proves invaluable:

1. After Document Processing

• Scenario: You upload a large document (e.g., a report, data file) and ask an Assistant Mate to analyze it or extract information.

• Action: Once the Mate has successfully processed the document and provided the output, hide the message containing the large file upload.

• Benefit: Prevents the large document data from being re-sent to the Mate in subsequent turns, saving tokens and keeping the context focused on the analysis results.

2. Iterative Refinement

• Scenario: You work with a Mate (e.g., Native or Image-gen) through several iterations to generate content, code, or an image until you reach the desired final version.

• Action: Hide all the intermediate messages containing previous drafts, corrections, or less successful attempts.

• Benefit: Ensures the Mate only refers to the final, approved version in future interactions, avoiding confusion and reducing context size.

3. Comparing Mate Responses Unbiasedly

• Scenario: You want to ask two different Mates the same question to compare their perspectives or capabilities, but you don't want the second Mate to be influenced by the first Mate's answer.

• Action:

  1. Ask the first Mate the question.

  2. Once the first Mate responds, hide its response message.

  3. Ask the second Mate the same question.

  4. After the second Mate responds, unhide the first Mate's response.

• Benefit: Allows for an unbiased comparison of the Mates' outputs. You can then discuss both responses with the Mates or your team.

4. Managing Off-Topic Discussions

• Scenario: A conversation temporarily drifts onto a side topic that isn't relevant to the main goal but contains useful information or context for human participants.

• Action: Hide the block of messages related to the temporary tangent.

• Benefit: Keeps the Mate focused on the primary objective while preserving the side discussion for human reference and maintaining the overall conversation flow record.

When Not to Hide Messages

While powerful, avoid hiding messages that contain crucial context, instructions, or decisions that Mates will need to refer back to later in the conversation. Hiding essential information can lead to confused or incomplete responses from Mates.

Conclusion

The "Hide Message" feature is more than just a cleanup tool; it's a strategic way to manage AI context, optimize costs, and maintain comprehensive human-readable records. By mastering this feature, you can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your collaboration with Mates on allmates.ai.

Related Articles

• Managing Messages in Your Conversations

• Understanding Key Concepts and Terminology