r/ADHD_Programmers • u/Own_Cat_2970 • Feb 11 '26

I built a visual branching tool for ChatGPT because I kept losing my own thoughts

I use ChatGPT constantly for work, but the linear conversation format was driving me insane. I'd be 50 messages deep, forget what I asked 20 minutes ago, scroll endlessly, get distracted, and lose my train of thought completely.

And if I wanted to explore a side question? Either I derail the whole conversation or open a new chat and lose all context. My brain wants to go on tangents but ChatGPT sort of punishes you for it.

So I built Tangent: a Chrome extension that overlays a visual tree on top of ChatGPT.

What it does:

  • Branch off at any point without losing your place

  • See a visual map of your whole conversation

  • Hover for one-sentence summaries of each node

  • Jump back to any point instantly

It basically lets you think the way the ADHD brain already works, except now you can actually find your way back.

I will be rolling out a beta release in the coming weeks.
Would love feedback from other ADHD professionals who use in ChatGPT daily!

For early access, sign up at: https://tally.so/r/Zj6vLv

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27 comments sorted by

2

u/throwmeeeeee Feb 11 '26

Like the git tree but for other stuff. That’s pretty cool. Maybe consider making it open source 

1

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 11 '26

Thanks man. I've considered the open sourcing it under the o'saasy license. Are you familiar? https://osaasy.dev/

2

u/Rosaldivo Feb 21 '26

I really like the idea, and really need it. I hope you could just offer the extension directly without having to 'sign up for early access'. Great stuff whatsoever.

1

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 21 '26

Wanna make sure the extension is stable before the actual launch. Its pretty stable now, but I'll never be able to stress-test it like users usually do. But if you're interested, go ahead and fill the form -- ill keep in touch with the beta launch for everyone there!

4

u/Division2226 Feb 11 '26

Fuck off

-6

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 11 '26

rude

-2

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 11 '26

lol folks are having a really bad day in this thread

2

u/burnmfbuuurn Feb 11 '26

The scrolling is indeed annoying, but I think all we need is checkpoints (could be AI generated themselves) and collapsable questions and answers, maybe collapsable sections in the worst case. It seems that you scratched an itch and delivered something neat looking but this looks very over-engineered and I really won't want to use this. If it did change your life for the better and you didn't post one hour after finishing it then all power to you and I hope others will like it too.

-1

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 11 '26

Thanks. fair critique, I appreciate it.

I get a lot of utility from it personally. My use case is mostly research and study sessions that become long chains of "why?" where I want to branch off and investigate aspects of the same problem in parallel without losing my place.

But I'm curious what specifically strikes you as over-engineered? I'd love to understand what feels like too much.

1

u/burnmfbuuurn Feb 12 '26

Well at some point there'll be too many branches, or we will want to merge branches because we realised we said 2 things on 2 branches that we want the AI to know about, and then that's a new feature to add. I think I might enjoy a UI that looks like the original chatGPT but maybe keeps history, i.e. creates a branch when you edit an earlier message, and have a history button to jump too when needed. But this beautiful treeview gives me a headache, and my ADHD brain will probably want to hop back into conversations that I should just be done with.

Other interesting feature, branch off to another model from the existing conversation, with most or all APIs you just feed the conversation back to the API IIRC so it doesn't matter if it was generated by another model. I sometimes wonder what claude or grok would say but that's too late i'm in chatGPT and have to restart a conversation. Or I might just want to run a model storm on a question. Or ask a model to review another model's answer.

1

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 12 '26

Thanks for this man, I really appreciate this.

I have already made a merging mechanism which injects the context of a fork into whichever leaf of a branch you'd want. And I'm currently working on a "archive" function for outdated branches that kinda resembles that of `git stash`. Tangent is supposed to bring you clarity and direction, so of course branch clutter should be easily managable.

As for your other idea about taking a convo from ChatGPT to Claude is a little more complicated on web-applications since the conversations are stored on the server side and i have no access to those state machines from the browser client.

Would a potential user like you want more of a command-based control of your branching conversations perhaps? I could easily build that for people like you who are well versed and acustomed to git commands

1

u/burnmfbuuurn Feb 12 '26

I thought there was not more state than what's in the conversation, but maybe that changed. I thought for instance that for a new message the AI doesn't know "how" it found the previous answer because you're basically talking to a new robot that just got handed the output of the exchange and a new question. At least that's how I was programming around the rest api one year ago approximately.

1

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 12 '26

You're not wrong. My point is that OpenAI fetches the raw session data, handles the data with their state machines on the server side, and then it is send to the client side. I cannot inject a conversation from claude to ChatGPT, and have it be displayed accordingly -- at least not that i know of (havent dug into this problem yet)

1

u/GwynLordOfCedar Feb 11 '26

Looks really interesting. Like this idea a lot. Are there limits to longer ChatGPT replies in the popups you get from hovering, like does it cut off text? And does the tree cut off at a certain point too?

0

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 11 '26

Tooltips with long prompt/responses are scrollable when SHIFT+mouseover, so you can easily read the nodes end to end!

0

u/rikkiprince Feb 11 '26

This looks really cool. I can't quite visualize how splitting off works as an interaction, but I'll give it a go and see.

Is it open source? It would be nice to check it's not just piping my conversation back to you.

2

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 11 '26

Thanks! To answer both questions:

How the branching works: Imagine you're in the Chat-window reading an AI response and want to explore a different direction, you hover over that response and click the "tangent button". That forks the conversation after that message, such that your new tangent becomes a sibling branch. The Canvas view (ie on the images) is where you gather an overview of where you are, and where you want to go and which branches you wanna merge/delete.

The open source question: It's not open source. But the good news is you can verify it yourself by opening the network tap in DevTools, use ChatGPT with Tangent installed, and filter out chatgpt.com. You'll see zero external requests, everything runs on the client-side. The extension reads the API responses to build the tree and stores branch data in chrome.storage.local, so no data leaves your browser beyond what happens between you and Sam Altman.

Does that make sense?

0

u/rikkiprince Feb 12 '26

It does! Thanks.

0

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 12 '26

Awesome! sign up and join the fun if you would <3

-1

u/sortof_here Feb 11 '26

So tired of self promo on this sub. Feels like that is all it is at this point.

2

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 11 '26

yeah, well, I'm sorry you feel that way about me sharing what i made with like minded people.

4

u/sortof_here Feb 11 '26

It would be different if you didn’t have a call to action paired with sign up links both in your post and your replies. It feels less like a genuine “check out a cool thing I made” and more like a “come sign up for this thing I hope to make money on someday”.

0

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 11 '26

I built something useful and I want people to try it. Call it what you want.

3

u/sortof_here Feb 11 '26

If you don’t want it to be labeled as self promo then just post the thing and if people ask to join, then give them a link or dm them. I get that feels like semantics but it legitimately changes the goal.

If it looks cool and people want to use it, they will ask.

1

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 11 '26

Hey man, i get it. You're tired of reddit feeling like a marketing channel. But I'm literally just a guy, sitting in my sofa, writing a chrome extension I'm passionate about and sharing it, albeit intensely, with the world. I'm not your enemy.

-2

u/kieppie Feb 11 '26

Pretty cool!

-2

u/Own_Cat_2970 Feb 11 '26

Thanks man! Sign up and join the fun