Enabled User · Module 06

Migration and Re-seed

After this, you can recognise when a conversation has run its course, close it, and start a fresh one that carries forward only what is essential.

Intro

E-05 was about planning before you start — catching wrong turns before any work has been done. E-06 is about the other end: knowing when a conversation has run its course and starting fresh. Not because something went wrong, but because the conversation has done its job and continuing it is now costing more than it is giving.

The concept

Every conversation with an AI has a natural lifespan. When the task is complete, when the direction has changed, or when the responses start repeating things you already know — the conversation has done its job. The right move is to start a new one.

Starting fresh is not abandonment. The AI has no continuity preference. It does not register that the conversation ended. Every new conversation is completely fresh to it. The only continuity in AI use is what you carry forward yourself.

The re-seed is how you do that. It is a short opening message for the new conversation that captures only the essential context from the old one — not a summary of everything that happened, not a transcript, not a recap of the process. Just the load-bearing facts and the new task.

Signals that a conversation needs re-seeding

The AI repeats something you corrected two or three messages ago.
Your messages are getting longer as you re-explain context the AI seems to have lost track of.
The task has shifted significantly from where it started — you are using the same conversation for something that is really a different task.
You are working around earlier mistakes in the conversation rather than fixing them.
The responses feel increasingly generic, as though the AI is producing something safe rather than something specific to your situation.

Any one of these is enough. When you notice one, the conversation has run its course.

The re-seed template

A re-seed has three parts. It should fit in a short paragraph.

Part 1 — Role and context (one sentence): What the AI needs to know about you and the situation. The same role and context you would include in an opening seed.

Part 2 — What was decided or produced (one sentence): Carry forward the output, not the process. What exists now as a result of the previous conversation? A draft, a decision, a structure, a list. One sentence. Not the history of how you got there.

Part 3 — The new task: Verb + specific thing + stopping condition + constraint. Everything from the full message structure you have been building across the course.

Three parts. One short paragraph. The AI gets what it needs and nothing it does not.

The exercise

Find a conversation that has gone long or drifted — one that started with one task and now covers two or three, or one where the responses have started to feel less useful than they were at the beginning.

Write a re-seed for it. Use the three-part structure above. Keep it short: one paragraph, three sentences.

Then start a new conversation. Send the re-seed as your opening message.

Compare the first response in the new conversation to the last few responses in the old one. Look for:

Specificity — is the new response more targeted to your actual situation?
Freshness — does the AI engage with the task directly, without the accumulated weight of the previous thread?
Length — a fresher context often produces a more focused response

You are not looking to prove the old conversation was bad. You are building the habit of knowing when to move.

Copy-Personalise-Use

The re-seed starter

I'm a [role]. I've been working on [task] and [one sentence: what was decided or produced]. Now I need to [verb] [specific thing]. [Stopping condition]. [Constraint].

How to edit this

[role] — who you are, for context. Same as your opening seed.
[task] — what the previous conversation was about, in a few words.
[one sentence: what was decided or produced] — the carry-forward. What exists now that did not before? "I have a draft structure with five sections" or "we decided to focus on the retention problem rather than the acquisition problem." One sentence. Not a history.
[verb] — from E-01.
[specific thing] — what you need done now.
[stopping condition] — from B-10.
[constraint] — from E-02. Optional, but use it if there is something the AI should not change.

The discipline here is the one-sentence carry-forward. It forces you to decide what actually matters from the old conversation. If you find yourself wanting to write three sentences of carry-forward, run the load-bearing test from E-03: which sentence, if removed, would change the output? Keep that one.

What good looks like

The new conversation's first response is more useful than the last few responses in the old one. The AI has exactly what it needs — no more — and it uses it. You did not have to re-explain something you already explained. The re-seed was the whole setup.

If the re-seed produces a generic response

The carry-forward probably did not include enough specific context. Add one more load-bearing fact — the one piece of information from the old conversation that most changes what the AI should produce — and try again.

E-07 is the final module of the Enabled User stage. It is not a new concept — it is a synthesis. You will build a personal reference card for working with AI: short, in your own words, built from your own most common tasks. The thing that replaces the course.