Pinned chats redefine the workspace

Pinned chats in ChatGPT look trivial at first glance. It’s basically “favorites for chats”, right? But to me, this is the first real UX primitive that nudges LLMs from being stateless REPLs into something closer to long-lived project workspaces. Think about your own workflow. Today, most people treat AI like a scratchpad. You drop in a prompt, get an answer, maybe copy some code, and move on. The context dies. The intent dies. Next week you’re asking the same thing again because you forgot what you tried. Now add pinned chats, Tasks / Pulse‑style background work, branched threads, and app integrations. Suddenly you are not chatting with “the model” anymore. You are maintaining ongoing, named, versioned conversations that map directly to products, repos, and experiments. Feels less like a chat app and more like an IDE for agents that just happens to look like messaging. The boring-looking features are usually the ones that quietly reshape the platform. Pinned chats are one of those.