Gemini 3.0 is great, but the UI deletes your history on edit. So I built a “Time Machine” to save every branch and retry (Open Source)

Like many of you, I've been testing the new Gemini 3.0 models. The model is fantastic, but the UI has a massive "anti-feature" that drives me crazy: Destructive Edits.

Unlike Claude or ChatGPT where you can toggle back to previous versions of a prompt, Gemini overwrites your old conversation turn when you edit a message or hit "Regenerate".

If you are doing prompt engineering or creative writing, this is a nightmare. You tweak a prompt, get a worse result, and realize the previous version (which is now gone forever) was actually better.

So, I updated my open-source tool, Lyra Exporter, to fix this.

The Update: Realtime Branching (The "Git" for Chat)

I added a feature that silently runs in the background. It captures the conversation state before Gemini's UI overwrites it.

• 🌳 Complete Decision Trees: If you edit a prompt 3 times, Lyra saves 3 separate branches. If you hit retry 5 times, it saves 5 versions.
• 👀 Visual Timeline: You can browse these "parallel universes" in a clean visual interface. Nothing is ever lost.
• 💾 "Curator Mode" (My favorite part): You can stitch together a "perfect conversation" by picking the best response from Branch A and the best follow-up from Branch B, then export it as a single, coherent long screenshot or Markdown file.
• 🛡️ Privacy First: It supports manual redaction (blacking out sensitive info) before you export screenshots.

How it works:

1. Install the userscript (It hooks into the Gemini/Claude web response).
2. Chat as usual. The script records the hidden candidate and version data that the official UI ignores.
3. Open the Lyra panel to see the full history tree.
4. Export to JSON, Markdown, or Image.

Privacy Note (Important):
Just like my previous release for Claude, everything runs locally in your browser. No data is sent to my server. The code is open source on GitHub, so you can audit it yourself. I built this because I don't want my private chats on some random cloud.

Links:

• GitHub: https://github.com/Yalums/lyra-exporter
• Userscript (GreasyFork): https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/539579-lyra-s-exporter-fetch

I’m still actively working on this (especially the Gemini 3.0 integration), so let me know if you run into any bugs!