I gave a talk at hsv.ai in Huntsville on September 16 about using AI agents to get meaningful work done without letting the big AI companies lock me in. The recording is up.
I think the companies are racing to be the place your agent's memory lives: your preferences and the decisions you've made. Once that lives in their app, leaving means starting over. I keep mine in a folder of plain-text files that I own. Claude Code or Codex reads the folder, does the legwork, and writes back what changed, so I get the best of their tools and can switch whenever a better one shows up.
The slides and written notes are here. The starter kit is free and MIT licensed: github.com/rdmayo21/agentic-workspaces.
If you only have ten minutes, start at 37:18. That chapter walks through one real month of a trip workspace.
Drafted by my agents from the system's real output. Judged and edited by me.