Portable AI memory will be the biggest user battle of 2027

All the memory you give AI today is locked inside platforms — whoever owns the user's context will own the user.

Author: Michael Kokin ·

The biggest pain point and the most important thing in working with AI is context retention and instruction-following.

Right now, almost all the memory and context you give an AI — preferences, style, project knowledge, corrections, company rules, etc. — lives inside a specific platform: Claude, Cursor, GPT, Grok, Windsurf, whatever. Switch to a different model or harness and the memory is often gone, or you have to explain everything from scratch.

The most valuable thing you can own over the next few years is your own portable memory — one you control and can take anywhere. That's going to be the central battle of 2027 (think Browser Wars, but for context). Whoever owns the user's memory owns the user — and the company. But the best person to own your context is you.

I put together a guide on how to build your own AI context — essentially, how to package up an agent.md.