Do not bet on one horse. I say it all the time.
And since January, I have been betting on exactly one horse.
I am a heavy Claude user. Everything lives there. My projects. My prompts. My context. Months of my thinking, parked inside one vendor's product.
Then ChatGPT shipped new models, and people I trust are raving about them. I have not touched them.
Not because I do not want to. Because I do not want to move my crap from Claude to ChatGPT.
Read that back. I am staying put because leaving feels like work.
Even the AI Boss does not take her own advice sometimes.
THE OLD PHONE IN THE DRAWER
Remember what switching phones used to be like?
Your contacts lived on the phone. Your photos lived on the phone. Getting a new one meant a Saturday afternoon retyping numbers and begging the kid at the mall kiosk to move your pictures. Half of them did not make it. So you kept the old phone in a drawer. Just in case.
Now you buy a new phone, sign in, and ten minutes later it is your phone. Contacts. Photos. Texts. All of it just shows up.
What changed? Your stuff stopped living in the phone. It moved up a level, into your account, and your account wires into any phone you pick up. The phone became disposable. Nothing is trapped on it anymore.
My Claude setup is the old phone. Your company probably is too.
Your customer history lives in the CRM. Your playbooks live in the project tool. Your pricing logic lives in a spreadsheet one person understands. Every new tool somebody buys, somebody else retypes the same knowledge into it. It is 2005 and you are standing at the mall kiosk.
Part one of this series was the Skeleton. Your data.
Part two was the Circulatory System. Your context.
Part three was the Muscles. Your tools, and the reps that build them.
This is part four. The Central Nervous System. The wiring.
Your brain does not live in your hand. It lives in one place, and nerves run from that one place into every muscle you have. The muscle never stores the instructions. It just gets the signal and fires.
That is the design. Context in one place you own. Wiring into every tool you use. Tools that fire when the signal comes and hold nothing that matters.
Most companies build it backwards. They stuff the brain into each muscle. Then they wonder why leaving any tool feels impossible.
THE TOOLS WILL NOT HOLD STILL
Here is why this matters more every single month.
Last Saturday night I met a guy at a dinner. New friend, runs his whole business on AI. He told me he swaps parts of his stack every 30 to 90 days. Not because he is flaky. Because the best tool in March is not the best tool in June anymore. The world is moving that fast.
Thirty to ninety days. Sit with that number.
If your plan is to pick the forever tool, roll it out for a year, and settle down with it, you are making a mistake. There is no forever tool. Right now there is barely a this-quarter tool.
So the question is not which tool to marry. The question is what happens to your stuff every time you switch.
If your context lives inside the tool, switching is surgery. So you do not switch. You stay with a tool that stopped being the best one a while ago. Not because you love it. Because leaving hurts too much.
That is not loyalty. That is a hostage situation. And the ransom is your own knowledge. I know, because I have been paying it since January.
WHAT I AM DOING ABOUT IT
Here is my fix, and it is not fancy.
I am going back through the projects I use most and pulling a second brain out of each one. One document per project. The context, the decisions, the way I think about that work, all of it in a plain file that lives outside every tool.
I covered how to build one in the bonus issue. I am just finally eating my own cooking.
Now when I want to try the new ChatGPT models, I load the file and go. Claude on Monday. ChatGPT on Tuesday. Whatever wins next quarter after that.
The context is mine. The tools compete for me. That is how it should have been all along.
OWN THE WIRING, RENT THE TOOLS
So here is the rule. Own the nervous system. Rent everything else.
Your data. Your context. Your rules. Those live in one place, under your name, in a form any tool can read.
Then treat every tool like a phone. Useful today. Gone whenever something better shows up. Plan on swapping something every quarter. Budget for it. Expect it. The companies that win the next few years will not be the ones that picked the right tools. They will be the ones that made picking wrong cheap.
Here is your figure it out moment. Pick the tool you would hate most to lose. Now ask yourself why.
If the answer is you love what it does, great. Keep it until something better comes.
If the answer is that everything you know is trapped inside it, you do not own your nervous system. The vendor does. And they know it.
For me it was Claude. What is yours?
Kathy
THE AI BOSS
QUESTIONS PEOPLE KEEP ASKING
Should I wait for the AI tool market to settle before picking one?
No. The market is not going to settle. The way to win is not picking the right tool, it is making the wrong pick cheap. Keep your data and your context in one place you own, wire them into whatever tool is best today, and swap when something better shows up.
How often should a company expect to change AI tools?
Faster than you think. People running serious AI operations are swapping parts of their stack every 30 to 90 days, because the best tool in March is not the best tool in June. Budget for a swap every quarter and treat any tool older than a year as up for review.
What is AI vendor lock-in?
Vendor lock-in is when your knowledge lives inside a tool instead of underneath it. Your prompts, your context, your rules sit in one vendor's product, so leaving means losing months of work. You stop switching because leaving hurts, not because the tool is still the best. That is a hostage situation, and the ransom is your own knowledge.
How do I switch from Claude to ChatGPT without losing my work? Pull a second brain out of each project you use most. One plain document per project holding the context, the decisions, and the way you think about that work. Keep it outside every tool. Then load that document into whichever tool you want to use that day. The context is yours, and the tools compete for you.
What is a second brain for AI?
A second brain is one document that holds how you think. Your points of view, your rules of thumb, your non-negotiables, and the things only you know, written down once in a plain file that lives outside every tool. Load it into any AI and the machine stops giving you the average answer and starts giving you yours.
Where should my company's data and context live?
In one place you own, in a form any tool can read. Never inside the tools themselves. Tools should get the signal, do the work, and hold nothing that matters. That is the whole design: own the nervous system, rent the muscles.
THE BUSINESS BODY SERIES
Part One. The Skeleton. Everyone Wants Beach Muscles. Nobody Thinks About Dense, Durable Bones. Your data, and why your AI keeps guessing.
Part Two. The Circulatory System. Your AI Does Not Know How You Think. Context, your second brain, and what a guardrail really is.
Bonus. Build Your Second Brain. Let Claude Interview You. One hour. Five steps. Do it today.
Part Three. The Muscles. Your AI Strategy Is a Gym Membership You Are Not Using. Why buying the tools does nothing.
Part Four. The Central Nervous System. You are reading it.
Next up. The Immune System. What catches it when the machine gets something wrong.