Claude Tag is the clearest example yet of a trap nobody is pricing in. And this is not a Claude problem. ChatGPT and every other major tool are racing to the exact same place: become where your work lives, then keep it there. It never feels like a trap, and that is the whole problem. Day one it is pure convenience. You tag the assistant in a thread, it answers. You let it read your docs, it gets sharper. It remembers context you would have to re-explain to anyone else. It starts taking actions for you. Every step is helpful. Nobody ever sits down and decides to lock themselves in. So it accretes. One useful message at a time, your operating memory drifts inside one company's agent. Your decisions, your history, the reasons behind the work. Six months later the switching cost is not a subscription anymore. It is your whole operation. You are renting your own company back from them, and the rent only goes up. Here is the distinction that fixes it. The model is not the lock-in. The model is the cheap part, and a better one ships every few weeks. The expensive part is your context: the memory, the decisions, the trail of why. Most people give the expensive part away for free so the cheap part runs a little smoother. So I built it the other way around. I run my life and company off a folder of plain text files I own. Markdown is the single source of truth. A team of AI specialists runs on top of that folder, reading and writing to it. And here is the part that makes it real: I can point Claude at it today, ChatGPT (Codex) tomorrow, Gemini the day after. Whichever model is best this month, all on top of the same folder. Nothing important lives inside the model. It lives in files I can open, permission, and carry anywhere. Based on this folder I still can pull any relevant information from Slack or whatever other team communication tools we're using, giving my Claude even more context than just Slack threads. What about that email that links to that thread? What about that task comment on ClickUp that is related too? So if you flip the approach, having everything related to you in a local folder and grap any relevant information to get my job done, it not only is more holistic, but also keeps the already noisy chat channels away from my bot adding even more noise. Rent the intelligence. Own the context. That's also why I turned the auto-memory features off in these tools, on purpose. Then I use the terminal versions instead of the pretty chat apps. Yes, the terminal looks uglier. It also does far more, and it is nowhere near as scary as it looks the moment you actually try it. I'm a professional, not a developer saying this. The polished app is the part that quietly keeps your context. The plain interface is the part that hands it back to you. And this is not only a company problem. Look at your own digital life. Your notes, your memory, your half-made decisions, scattered across whatever app was hot this quarter, each one quietly becoming the place that part of you lives. You are renting yourself back too. The durable move is the same at every scale. Own the layer that holds who you are and what you have decided. Rent the thing that thinks on top of it, and keep that swappable forever. So be honest: where does your memory actually live right now, and could you walk out with it tomorrow?