# You're About to Rent Your Own Life Back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asnaDAaKlw0

[00:00] If you follow me on this channel, you know my whole life and business runs through this one local folder.
[00:05] Plain text files on my own disk and on top of it, I run a whole team of AI agents.
[00:11] Right now, Claude is the engine.
[00:14] Now, look at this.
[00:16] I swap Claude with Codex.
[00:18] Same folder, same agents, same contracts.
[00:21] I just swapped the brain on top and I could do the same again to Gemini GLM and whatever you like to use.
[00:25] Now, here's why I'm showing you this today.
[00:27] Two days ago, Anthropic put Claude inside Slack, a team communication tool.
[00:31] So, look at what they actually said.
[00:33] "A new way for teams to work with Claude.
[00:36] You tag it in, you delegate a task to it, and it goes and does the work while you focus on something else.
[00:42] This isn't a chatbot you message.
[00:45] It's a teammate you tag by name.
[00:47] It remembers the channels it lives in, it connects the tools you give it, and it acts even in the background and without tagging it."
[00:54] And here's the part nobody's saying out loud, guys.
[00:56] It's generally useful, but this is exactly
[01:00] why it's a trap.
[01:03] Here's the thing.
[01:03] Every AI company right now is racing to become the place where your work and your memory live.
[01:09] And on day one, it never feels like a trap.
[01:11] Day one, it's pure convenience.
[01:13] So, in this video, I'm going to show you the pattern why this trap springs 6 months later and the one move that makes you immune to it.
[01:19] Three things you leave with after the video.
[01:22] One, why this is the whole industry and not one company being evil.
[01:26] Two, which part of all this is actually expensive and why you're giving it it away for free.
[01:30] Three, the setup I run every day so I never have to care which model wins this month and it is actually fully free.
[01:37] Let me write this out fast because if you walk away thinking this is just a Claude problem, you missed it.
[01:44] Claude tag landed June 23rd.
[01:47] Three weeks earlier, on June 4th, OpenAI did almost the exact same thing from the other side.
[01:54] And again, this isn't me reading tea leaves.
[01:56] Here's OpenAI's own announcement.
[01:58] They call it dreaming.
[02:00] Their words, not mine.
[02:00] ChatGPT now builds a memory of you in the background
[02:03] across years of your past conversations,
[02:06] and it updates the picture on its own.
[02:08] You don't curate it anymore.
[02:08] You don't save anything.
[02:10] It just learns you while you sleep.
[02:13] Same months, two different companies, the exact same move.
[02:15] One puts a teammate in your Slack that remembers everything.
[02:18] The other builds a profile of you that updates while you sleep.
[02:22] And it's not just me calling this a shift.
[02:25] Look at this.
[02:27] This is Andrej Karpathy, probably the most trusted voice in this whole field.
[02:29] He called Claude Tech the third major redesign of how we use AI.
[02:33] First, it was a website you go to.
[02:36] Then an app you download.
[02:38] And now, his words, a self-contained persistent entity with your whole organization's tools and context working alongside your team.
[02:41] And he's right.
[02:44] It works, and it's generally impressive.
[02:46] Here's the part that makes me smile, though.
[02:49] He joined Anthropic.
[02:51] So, of course he's excited.
[02:52] And honestly, so am I.
[02:54] The shift is real.
[02:55] But being excited about the shift and handing over your context are two completely different decisions.
[02:58] And
[03:04] almost nobody is separating them.
[03:06] So, why are they all doing this at once?
[03:09] Well, it's not a coincidence, and it's not a conspiracy.
[03:11] It's incentives.
[03:13] Every one of these companies has worked out the same thing.
[03:16] The model is a commodity now.
[03:18] A better one ships every few weeks.
[03:21] So, they cannot lock you in with the model anymore.
[03:23] They lock you in with your memory.
[03:25] With a layer that remembers your decisions, your history, your context.
[03:29] Whoever owns that layer owns you.
[03:32] So, they're all reaching for it at the same time.
[03:34] Claude, ChatGPT, or Codex, Gemini, the rest.
[03:37] Watch the next 6 months.
[03:39] They'll all ship some version of, "Let me remember everything for you."
[03:44] So, how does the trap actually spring?
[03:45] Well, on day one, there is no trap.
[03:48] There's just a tool that saves you 20 minutes.
[03:50] That's the whole genius of it.
[03:52] You tag it once, it pulls the right doc.
[03:55] Helpful.
[03:57] You tag it again, it remembers what your team decided last week.
[03:59] Even more helpful.
[04:01] A month in, it knows your projects, your clients, your shorthand.
[04:03] 3 months in, you stop writing
[04:06] things down anywhere else, because why would you?
[04:08] It already knows.
[04:10] And then one day you go to leave.
[04:13] Maybe the price tripled, maybe the terms changed, maybe a model you depend on got turned off overnight, which by the way already happened this once with Fibl, and you realize the why behind every decision your company made for the last 6 months doesn't live in your head, and it doesn't live in a file you own.
[04:31] It lives inside one vendor's agent layer.
[04:34] That's the moment the bill comes due.
[04:35] You're not their customer anymore.
[04:37] You're renting your own operation back from them.
[04:40] Your own company, your own decisions, your own memory.
[04:44] And the switching cost isn't the subscription.
[04:46] The switching cost is starting your whole brain over.
[04:48] I've watched this movie before.
[04:50] I started this channel in 2017 reviewing note-taking apps, Rome Research, Obsidian, Notion, Mem, Tana, Heptabase.
[04:58] I lived inside each one.
[05:01] And every time one got bought or shut down or pivoted, I lost the structure I'd built in it.
[05:05] The notes maybe exported,
[05:08] Thinking did not.
[05:08] I'm not doing that again with my agents.
[05:12] So here's the distinction that fixes the whole thing.
[05:14] And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
[05:16] The model is the cheap part.
[05:19] I know that sounds backward.
[05:21] These things cost billions to train, but to you, the user, the model is the cheap, replaceable part.
[05:28] A better one comes out every few weeks.
[05:30] You didn't build it.
[05:30] You cannot keep it.
[05:32] You rent it by the token.
[05:35] Your context is the expensive part.
[05:37] Your decisions, your history, the why behind how you work, your clients, your projects, your taste, the thousand small judgments that make your operations yours.
[05:44] That took you years.
[05:48] Nobody can hand it back to you if you lose it.
[05:50] And here's what almost everybody doing without noticing.
[05:54] They're giving away the expensive part, their context, for free.
[05:56] So, they can rent the cheap part, the model, by the month.
[06:01] That's the trade.
[06:03] That's the actual trade you're making every time you let one of these tools remember everything for you.
[06:08] Flip it.
[06:08] Own the expensive part, rent the cheap part.
[06:10] That's the whole video in one line.
[06:12] Own your context, rent the intelligent chance.
[06:15] So, what does owning your context actually look like?
[06:16] Remember the folder that I showed you in the beginning of the video?
[06:19] Let me actually walk you through it.
[06:21] So, this is the actual folder my whole operations runs on.
[06:25] Look at it.
[06:25] There's no app here.
[06:27] There's no login.
[06:27] There's no cloud.
[06:30] It's plain text files, markdown, sitting on my own disk.
[06:32] I can back it up in any way or form I want to.
[06:35] This is the actual file.
[06:37] You can read it, I can read it.
[06:39] It's just words.
[06:39] Here's a project.
[06:41] Here's a person.
[06:43] Here's what we agreed.
[06:43] This is my context, the expensive part, cross-connected information.
[06:48] And it lives in a format that opened in 1975 and will still open in 2055.
[06:52] No vendor in the middle.
[06:55] And then on top of that folder, I run a team of AI specialists.
[06:56] Each one has a contract, a plain text file that says who it is and how it works.
[07:03] This is the actual roster I run every day.
[07:06] Here's the architecture, and this is the part that makes you immune.
[07:10] The folder is mine.
[07:10] The agents are mine.
[07:13] The contracts are mine.
[07:15] The model underneath is the only swappable part.
[07:19] I can point Claude at this exact folder,
[07:21] or ChatGPT via Codex, or whatever's best this month.
[07:24] Same folder, same agents, same contracts.
[07:27] I just swap the engine.
[07:30] You saw me do it in the first 10 seconds of this video.
[07:32] Inspectable because I can read every file.
[07:34] Portable because it's just text on my disk.
[07:37] Model neutral because nothing in here is tied to one company.
[07:40] The folder doesn't care who is thinking on top of it, even if it is just myself.
[07:47] So, that's the difference.
[07:49] Claude Tech wants your context to live in its box.
[07:52] ChatGPT wants your context to live in its profile.
[07:54] I keep my context in my local folder and I let them compete to be the brain that runs on top of it.
[08:01] I built this from the ground up with exactly this independence in mind.
[08:05] I call it my PKA, my personal knowledge assistant, and you can grab the whole scaffold for free.
[08:11] structure, the agents, the contracts,
[08:14] even a complete interface that runs on top of it that you can check out in the next video how this looks like.
[08:18] But, here's where I get a little contrarian on you.
[08:19] And this is what I actually do that most people won't.
[08:23] I turned the memory features off.
[08:25] The auto memory in Claude and ChatGPT, I switched it off because I don't want the tool remembering things about me based on their own decisions what they should save.
[08:35] I want the remembering to happen in my folder based on conditions what should get saved in a folder where I own it.
[08:40] And doing it this way, any other model will have the same memory available when I launch it on top of the folder.
[08:43] Remember that Claude published a migration tool from ChatGPT to bring over your knowledge from ChatGPT into Claude?
[08:55] What the heck, if you do something like this, you have it always ready from the get-go.
[08:59] And instead of the pretty chat app, I actually use the terminal version, the command line, the CLI.
[09:03] Let me just show you because I know how it all looks.
[09:07] Yes, it looks uglier.
[09:09] It's text on black screen, no nice
[09:13] buttons.
[09:13] It seems like code.
[09:13] I get it.
[09:16] So, why do I do it anyway?
[09:18] Well, the terminal version gives me more.
[09:20] More control over what the agent reads.
[09:22] More control over which model runs.
[09:24] More control over what touches my folder and what doesn't.
[09:29] The pretty app hides all of that from you.
[09:31] The terminal hands it to you.
[09:33] And I want to say this directly to the person watching who thinks the terminal isn't for them.
[09:37] I'm not a coder, I'm a busy professional.
[09:39] It's not as scary as it looks.
[09:42] It's just a place where you type what you want and it does it.
[09:44] That's it.
[09:46] You don't need to be a developer.
[09:48] You don't need to memorize anything.
[09:50] If you can write a sentence, you can use this.
[09:52] I promise you the first day feels weird and by the end of the week, it feels like the most honest tool you own because nothing's hidden from you.
[09:59] Uglier, yes, but it's mine end-to-end and nothing remembers anything about me except the folder I own.
[10:09] And before you think this is just my contrarian little take, listen to who else is saying it.
[10:11] This is Clément Delangue.
[10:12] He runs Hugging Face, one of
[10:15] the biggest names in the whole AI world.
[10:18] His words, "We've reached the peak of proprietary APIs and we are moving into a more balanced world where open models and the part you own get a much bigger share."
[10:27] So, when one of the people actually building this industry tells you the lock-in era is peaking, that's your signal.
[10:34] Own your side of it now while it's easy.
[10:36] Now, zoom out one more time because I've been talking about work, but this is bigger than your company.
[10:42] This is your personal digital life, too.
[10:44] Your notes, your memory, the half-made decisions scattered across whatever app was hot this quarter.
[10:51] Your photos in one company's cloud, your tasks in another, your thinking is a third.
[10:55] Every one of them quietly offering to remember it all for you in their box.
[11:00] Who you are as a record is getting spread across a dozen vendors that each want to own a piece of it.
[11:07] And the same fix applies.
[11:10] Own the layer that holds who you are.
[11:12] Rent the thing that thinks on top of it.
[11:14] Your context is you.
[11:14] Don't keep it in someone else's
[11:16] box.
[11:16] So, here's where I leave you.
[11:18] The model is the cheap part.
[11:20] It will keep getting better.
[11:22] It will keep getting cheaper and some of them will disappear.
[11:25] That's not your problem to solve once your context is yours.
[11:27] Your context is the expensive part.
[11:30] Build it somewhere you own.
[11:32] A folder of plain text on your own desk.
[11:35] Run a team of agents on top of it.
[11:37] Swap the model whenever a better one shows up.
[11:39] I put the entire folder up for free.
[11:41] The whole scaffold, the structure and the agents, the whole thing I run every day for myself.
[11:46] Link is in the description.
[11:48] Go grab it, point your favorite model at it, and stop renting your own life back from people.
[11:52] Now, let me know in the comments.
[11:54] Have you actually checked where your context lives right now?
[11:56] Is it in your folder or is it sitting in someone else's box?
[11:58] I'm curious.
[12:00] Drop it below.
[12:02] And if you want this for yourself, the scaffold is for free and joining us inside my IQ is free, too.
[12:04] It's where our co-founder Paco and me both are every day.
[12:08] And the full course that walks you through building this whole thing from scratch lives in there as well for when you want
[12:16] To go deeper than the free scaffold.
[12:18] And before you go, watch this next because in this video I showed you only the folder.
[12:23] The next thing I built is the cockpit, the app that runs on top of it and you still own yourself.
[12:29] And that one is already up to and for free.
[12:32] Go see how it all comes together.
[12:34] I'll catch you up in the next one.