Excellent reminder that attachment to any one tool is a weakness, not a strength. AI is no different. In fact, it probably exposes this issue that much more because it mimics human behavior and can create a connection that few other tools can. Your tips are a great way to maintain independence while still leveraging value.
I had this when I thought about moving from ChatGPT to Claude. Opened a fresh chat, stared at the blank box and thought... now I need to explain who I am, what I do, how I write, what I hate, and why the word “momentum” makes me angry.
The five-minute context test is the one I'd hand to most teams first: if everything needed to restart the work is buried in an old chat, the tool owns the workflow rather than the other way round. The subscription audit made me wince slightly as well. Where do you most often see the context getting stranded when someone does try to move?
This is why I tell founders to build systems, not dependencies.
The tool should support the process.
Not become the process.
That’s the test really. Can someone else still do the work if the favourite tool is gone and you’re not there to explain the weird little workaround?
A valuable reminder that resilience comes from the system, not just the tool.
Yeah, and it’s annoyingly easy to confuse the two while everything’s working.
The tool looks solid right up until it disappears and you find out the work was leaning on it much harder than you thought.
Sustainable workflows come from clear thinking, good processes, and reusable knowledge, not just mastering the latest technology.
Quite. Knowing every feature in the latest model doesn’t help much when nobody can explain how the work was actually being done.
The real test of any workflow is whether it survives losing the tool.
Losing the tool is a very rude way to find out what you never really owned.
Well put @John Brewton!
Excellent reminder that attachment to any one tool is a weakness, not a strength. AI is no different. In fact, it probably exposes this issue that much more because it mimics human behavior and can create a connection that few other tools can. Your tips are a great way to maintain independence while still leveraging value.
I had this when I thought about moving from ChatGPT to Claude. Opened a fresh chat, stared at the blank box and thought... now I need to explain who I am, what I do, how I write, what I hate, and why the word “momentum” makes me angry.
Yes! I had to do the same. And I worry about getting too attached to Claude. I remind myself regularly -- it's just a tool.
Hi @Kathy Wu Brady, yes I have faced this too until i was put in an environment with no Claude haha constrains are the motherhood of inventiveness.
The five-minute context test is the one I'd hand to most teams first: if everything needed to restart the work is buried in an old chat, the tool owns the workflow rather than the other way round. The subscription audit made me wince slightly as well. Where do you most often see the context getting stranded when someone does try to move?
Mine would get stranded in twelve chats called some version of “final”, “proper final” and “use this one”. A very sophisticated archive. 😅