Lock-in / switching costs are increasingly concerning me. I am using Claude for a good year now and have been accumulating so much "knowledge" in there by now. If Claude became less favorable in terms of price/performance in the future, that would worry me. I've started to think about a distributed solution, where my storage is detached from the inference, but currently Claude is still the way to go for me. Wondering if anyone has similar concerns?
Isn't all the "knowledge" just text files? I've transitioned between services easily by simply copying the text files.
You can even just instruct the LLM to create a context file for you! They are surprisingly good at that as well.
Studies show that LLM-generated context files have a negative impact on LLM performance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988
This.^ I realized this first when moving a design spec from Claude chat to Claude Code and panicked. I literally had to build something like Notion but for agents to act as a portable memory between all cloud and local models and agents. But honestly it paid off!
If you are interested you can try it out at markbase.cloud (disclaimer and all that). I am not charging for it.
We run a "context" repository that enables us to transition pretty seamlessly from model to model (usually codex to claude and back). It has skills / plugins / connectors / tooling in relatively malleable MD files. That's what I see as the future. Rather than exporting IDE settings we'll just carry our markdown to the next best tool.
It's hedging a bet at this point, but that's why people say there's no moat. If the tools are properly used + maintained, there should be no reason we can't use a new provider even next week (maybe with a little tweaking).
that's an interesting approach and something i also considered (using git to avoid conflicts). one thing i needed was a "database" (basically a folder of markdowns) with a fixed schema so i can let the agents record their decisions in (for example when the code conflicts with product design spec). this combined with search has been a real lifesaver.
this is how it works: https://help.markbase.cloud/humans/collections/overview
Believe it or not, after writing this comment I was doing some more reading on the task. I'm planning to reorganize our context repo after finding this paper (it argues that AI generated context files can stunt the performance of models):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988
For what it's worth, if you were considering building context out.
Very interesting. Anecdotally I’ve found the opposite to be the case. But I’m very interested in understanding more. Thanks for sharing
What knowledge?
Unless you work in some obscure domain, chances are that any general "knowledge" Claude has "learned" is already public data somewhere.
If you don't believe me, launch Codex and immediately start working on the same project (s). You might discover that all the knowledge accumulated means almost nothing.
Claude Code definitely remembers things about you. For just one of the more obvious examples: I was recently asking it to make some suggestions on software alternatives, and part of the answer included (paraphrased) "While a hosted service may be attractive due to your small ops team size, your experience with hosting Linux container-based services puts this squarely in the realm of an option for you." My prompt mentioned nothing about this.
This isn't something that is public knowledge, in the sense that you mean it.
Just earlier today it asked me if I wanted to create a jira ticket for something I asked it about doing. My prompt mentioned nothing about jira.
If you use Claude Code, you might want to take a look at the "auto memories" files that it creates. See "/memory" for some more information.
Not worried at all. Switching is trivial. Rebuilding context isn't very difficult and harnesses are a dime-a-dozen.
My favorite solution to this is to use the Cline coding agent, which is open and allows you to easily switch between different providers and models.
Knowledge in there?
Where is the knowledge stored?
All of my knowledge typically gets stored in plans outside of the agent?
And each agent window gets archived regularly, anyways.