Prompt Ghosting
ELI5 - The Vibe Check
Twelve messages into a conversation, the AI is confidently wrong about something you corrected six messages ago, and you realize the only way out is not to keep explaining, it's to close the tab and open a new chat like none of this ever happened. Prompt ghosting is abandoning a derailed conversation entirely rather than trying to save it.
Real Talk
Prompt ghosting is the practice of ending a long, unproductive conversation with an AI assistant and starting a fresh session rather than continuing to correct accumulated misunderstandings within the existing context. It's often more effective than persisting, since a polluted context window can keep steering the model back toward the same wrong answer no matter how the prompt is rephrased.
When You'll Hear This
"I ghosted that chat after the fifth wrong answer, starting fresh." / "Prompt ghosting works better than arguing, the context is already poisoned."
Related Terms
Context Poisoning
Context poisoning is when bad information makes it into the AI's context and contaminates everything after.
Context Rot
Context rot is when a long AI conversation has been running so long that the model is confusing old instructions with new ones, forgetting what it already...
Context Window
A context window is how much text an AI can 'see' at once — its working memory.
Model Standoff
You ask the AI to fix the bug. It confidently offers a fix. You explain that's not the bug. It confidently offers the same fix reworded.
Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the art of talking to AI so it actually does what you want.