I treated my AI chats like disposable coffee cups until I realized I was deleting 90% of the value. Here is the “Context Mining” workflow.

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LinguisticsPrograming/s/srhOosHXPA

I used to finish a prompt session, copy the answer, and close the tab. I treated the context window as a scratchpad.

I was wrong. The context window is a vector database of your own thinking.

When you interact with an LLM, it calculates probability relationships between your first prompt and your last. It sees connections between "Idea A" and "Constraint B" that it never explicitly states in the output. When you close the tab, that data is gone.

I developed an "Audit" workflow. Before closing any long session, I run specific prompts that shifts the AI's role from Generator to Analyst. I command it:

> "Analyze the meta-data of this conversation. Find the abandoned threads. Find the unstated connections between my inputs."

The results are often more valuable than the original answer.

I wrote up the full technical breakdown, including the "Audit" prompts. I can't link the PDF here, but the links are in my profile.

Stop closing your tabs without mining them.