I’d just finished a morning round of tinkering with the ham radio Extra Class tutor when the question hit me: how do I actually get the entire exam question pool into GPT without burning through tokens every time? With GPT Projects, I can just drop in a file and it remembers. But on the API side, things always felt a little more ephemeral — every call a blank slate. So I sat down with GPT-5 to dig into whether there’s a smarter, more cost-effective way. What followed was one of those back-and-forths where the clouds part: GPT Projects’ quiet little “remembered files” have a direct analogue in the API world — vector stores — and they might just be the key to making this whole tutor run leaner and meaner. Me: In GPT projects, I can upload files that the project remembers. Is there a way to do the same thing with the API? GPT-5: Great question. With the raw chat/completions endpoint, no — it’s stateless. You’d have to re-inject your files each time. But the newer OpenAI Respo...