Every time you move to a new AI platform, the same thing happens. You sit there and explain to the machine, all over again, who you are: that you write without bureaucratic fluff, that you hate being agreed with reflexively, that this project runs on Postgres and you don't touch it. Like introducing yourself again at a party where everyone has amnesia.
And then it lands: what you're retelling for the third time isn't a project brief. It's you. Your taste, your decisions, the mistakes you'd rather not repeat. The context a neural net holds about you is your portrait. Not the most flattering one, but honest.
And the real question now isn't whose model is smarter. It's who keeps that portrait: you, or the platform renting you the LLM.
I came across this idea recently, in a tweet, and haven't been able to shake it since. We pour ourselves into these chats more honestly than into half the people we know: the doubts, the raw ideas, the "what's the better way," the 3 a.m. "why is nothing working." The AI knows my work habits better than colleagues I've shared a meeting room with for five years. And that whole imprint sits in someone else's cloud, as a guest. And the platform values it exactly to the degree it would rather you didn't leave.
Your memory is worth keeping close. It's the one asset you take with you when you move to any other service. And that asset is what the defining battle of the coming years will be over — the way it once was over browsers.
It's not about paranoia, it's about belonging. It's strange to keep the most personal part of your work on someone else's server, the one with a "revoke access" button. Especially since models are getting cheaper by the day: soon there'll be plenty of them, nearly free. The one scarce thing left is you. Your accumulated context, your eye, your taste. The stuff you can't download.
So I keep my portrait locally — not in some smart service, but in a plain folder of text files. I can feed it to any model, read it with my own eyes, and delete it if I want. Unfashionable, but 100% mine.
In a previous column I wrote that the most valuable human skill is becoming taste. Well — context is taste, sorted into files: the accumulated "like / dislike," the "this is how we do it / this is how we don't." Handing it to a platform is like checking your own biography into storage and then asking permission to read it.
Putting it all together turned out to be an evening's work — plain text, no magic. I wrote it up step by step, with ready templates: how to build your AI context.
And I'll go add a couple of lines about myself to my folder. Someone has to remember who I am. Might as well be me.