# Your AI app should not own your work Source: https://aaronmakelky.com/blog/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work Last updated: 2026-10-26 When I canceled ChatGPT Plus, I realized I'd left my entire working life in it. The binder method keeps my instructions, context, and work in one GitHub folder any AI app can use, so I can switch apps any time. Copy the prompt to set up yours. October 26, 2026 · 6 min read AI Workflows · GitHub · Chief of Staff · Prompts ![Three people in suits with a beaver, a red panda, and a lion for heads stack their hands together in front of a wall of computer hardware](/images/blog/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work/hero.jpg) I started paying for ChatGPT Plus when it came out in February 2023, and I kept paying for it for 30 months. Then, in August of 2025, I canceled it. I was moving more of my work to Claude. Claude Code was a great product and the Anthropic models seemed to be all-around better than OpenAI’s. A lot of people I knew were making the same move. Then I opened Claude and realized I’d left my entire working life in ChatGPT. All the chats, folders, projects, custom GPTs, research, little decisions, half-finished threads — all gone. Plus the way I’d learned to work through problems with my AI sidekick, and ChatGPT’s understanding of how I went about things — also gone. All of it trapped inside the app I’d just canceled. Which sucked because of the way AI models work: they learn your preferences and styles, remember the work they’ve done, and generally get more useful and efficient the more context they accumulate. I had ChatGPT pretty dialed in, then I had to start over in Claude. Since then, I’ve been making all my AI workflows model-agnostic, so I can seamlessly change apps any time I want to. And I do want to, all the time, for lots of reasons. Models change constantly, the big labs leapfrogging each other every month or so. Prices change too. And different models are better at different things: Claude Opus is the best designer, but GPT 5.5 is the most persistent with complex tasks, and Cursor’s Composer 2.5 is unbelievably fast. Any one of them might degrade (spend 15 minutes on [tech Twitter](https://x.com/uzairansar/status/2056510232998695180?s=20) and you’ll see) [or have an outage](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/954831/claude-is-down), or get shut down on Friday afternoon by, for instance, [order of the US government](https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-says-us-government-ordered-it-to-shut-down-mythos-models/). ![Claude status page: Claude.ai is experiencing elevated error rates, with Investigating, Monitoring, and Resolved updates posted Jun 23, 2026](/images/blog/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work/claude-status.jpg) We were experiencing them too. Model madness aside, your employer could decide to switch their subscription; you might change jobs, go from a Claude shop to a ChatGPT shop. I know someone who quit a coveted job after two weeks because his new employer only allowed Microsoft CoPilot. How annoying would that be? This all comes down to switching cost. Like changing your bank or jumping from iPhone to Android, the more you use these tools the more difficult it is to move to a new one. It doesn’t have to be. The way AI models work, it’s actually super easy to put all your instructions, context, documentation, and work records in a neutral place that can connect to any LLM. You don’t need to write any code. Let me walk you through a simple setup you can use to hop between AI apps all you want, so you’re never tied to a single AI lab or app. ## The binder method Imagine if you could put all the work you do with AI — research, automations, scheduling, data analysis, whatever — in a three-ring binder with tabs in it. The binder would sit on a shelf by your desk. You’d add new pages and remove old ones as necessary, and keep a record of what changed. You could let someone else read it rather than taking a half hour to explain how you do things. If you changed jobs, you’d take the binder with you. We’re going to create a virtual version of that, one that AI tools can access, read, and edit. The pages of the binder will be simple text files. The binder itself will be a folder, also simple. The shelf will be [GitHub](https://github.com/). Wait! Don’t click away. I know GitHub sounds like a crazy-techno-nerd-planet for engineers, but it’s not as forbidding as you think. And while you can build your shelf anywhere a chatbot can access — your hard drive, Google docs, Dropbox, and so on — GitHub works better because it gives you a clear record of what changed, when. It’s like your virtual librarian: when an AI app wants to see your files, it checks them out and back in, and GitHub records everything. So when an AI app goes rogue and posts a bunch of stuff you didn’t ask for in Slack, or breaks one of your automations, you’ll be able to see which one it was, and what went wrong. ![A private GitHub repository named descript-chief-of-staff with folders for context, docs, scripts, skills, and vault, plus AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and README.md files](/images/blog/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work/github-repo.jpg) You don’t need to be an astronaut to use GitHub. It looks like this. GitHub stores your files in a repository, or repo — that’s your binder. My MacBook can check out the binder. My Mac Studio can too. ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Codex can work in it. So can my favorite open-source models, Zai (GLM 5.2) and MiniMax (3.0). GitHub is free to get started on, and as long as you’re only working with text files, you won’t need to pay. There’s plenty of good how-to materials on the site and YouTube, though you probably won’t need them. You can sign up and create your own repo in 10 minutes. ## What goes in the binder Wherever you keep it, a useful binder doesn’t need to be complicated. Mine has five basic tabs. The first tab is a running to-do list, a plain-English markdown file I simply call today. It gathers, sorts, and prioritizes what I have to get done, you know, today. It knows where I’m waiting on someone and where I’m blocking someone. To find out what I need to work on next, I just type “what else needs to get done today?” or “I finished that project, mark it as done,” in legible text like that. I also have a projects folder for ongoing work and an AI-agent instructions folder that tells any AI app what kind of outputs I want, how to manage handoffs, where source materials live, and so on. I’ve got a skills folder with reusable instructions and app memory that work across agents. And a checkout card to track which agent on which device has touched my work. It’s all stored in markdown (.md) files, which sounds tech-y, but it’s not: they’re written in plain text — no code or weird symbols. I write them in text files I can read and save them as markdown files AI can read. With all this in place, I can tell any ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or any AI tool what I want, in plain language. It will go into my binder, get all the direction, context, and rules it needs, and go do it. In GitHub I’ll be able to see exactly what the AI did, in case I have to clean up some mess it made (I have; I will). When I want to tweak any of my instructions, I do it one place. ## What a binder gets you I recently had to do some LinkedIn research that was easier to plan in Cursor but better to finish in Codex because Codex has a web browser. In the old version of my workflow, I would have created the initial setup and instructions in Cursor, then copied that context into Codex, hoping I didn’t miss anything. With the binder method, when Cursor finished its planning run, it added context to the binder and checked it back into GitHub. Codex checked out the same binder, saw what Cursor had done, opened the right task, and finished the work in its browser. All I had to do was prompt each one of them. ## How to get started Just [paste this link](https://gist.github.com/a-makelky/c8a4ed34b02649d62050061c3d6664eb) into your AI chatbot of choice. It’s a prompt template for building your personal working folder in GitHub, connecting it to your AI tool(s), and using it every day. Or paste the text of this article into your chatbot and ask it to tell you what to do. Once you get it set up, you’ll be able to start every workday by typing something like “Let’s get to work” or “What’s today look like?” — just like you would with a human assistant — into ChatGPT/Claude/whatever bot. The AI will go read your GitHub folder, then scrape all the places your work and priorities live; then it’ll lay it all out for you, however you like it. You can ask it again when you come out of three hours of back-to-back calls and want to know what to do first. ## The app can change I am not loyal to any AI lab; OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t sports teams I grew up rooting for. They’re huge companies with priorities that don’t always align with mine. Plus, I’m AI-ADHD, and love to test things in parallel with different models. Since I switched to a Claude subscription last year, I’ve already switched back to ChatGPT Pro. It’s $200 a month, and it’s one of the last subscriptions I would cancel — for now. But if GPT models get worse, or Anthropic makes a big leap ahead, all I have to do is cancel one account and start another one. The reason is simple: I treat every AI app as a tool for getting work done, not the place where the work lives. This piece first ran in [Fort Human](https://forthuman.substack.com/p/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work). ## Related pages - [All field notes](/blog) - [The AI binder method, with a setup folder](/tools/ai-binder-method) - [GitHub for marketers, with Ryan Doser](/blog/github-for-marketers) - [How to use Cursor Automations](/blog/how-to-use-cursor-automations) - [I gave every AI agent its own Linear account](/blog/linear-multi-agent-workspace) - [About Aaron Makelky](/about) ## Sources and references - [Fort Human: Your AI app should not own your work](https://forthuman.substack.com/p/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work) - [The prompt as a GitHub gist](https://gist.github.com/a-makelky/c8a4ed34b02649d62050061c3d6664eb) - [Aaron on X (@theaaron)](https://x.com/theaaron) ## Common questions ### What is the binder method? Keeping all your AI instructions, context, documentation, and work records in plain markdown files in one folder, usually a GitHub repo, that any AI app can read and update. The app becomes a tool for getting work done, not the place where the work lives. ### Why use GitHub for the binder? GitHub records what changed and when. Each AI app checks the files out and back in, so if one breaks an automation or posts something you did not ask for, you can see which one it was and what went wrong. It is free for text files. ### How do I set up my own binder? Paste the prompt from the gist into ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Codex, or another AI app. It interviews you about your work, then builds the folder: a today.md to-do list, project notes, agent instructions, skills, and a handoff note.