PSA: Export your ChatGPT conversations before cancelling
If you're thinking about cancelling (or switching to Claude/Gemini), don't lose months of conversations first.
I built Basic Memory — it imports your ChatGPT export and turns it into plain Markdown files. Every conversation becomes a file you can actually read, search, and use with whatever AI you switch to.
This is not an ad. It is free and open source. Your data belongs to you. Keep it.
Steps:
1. Settings → Data Controls → Export Data (ChatGPT emails you a zip)
Senior/Staff/Principal Software Engineer with 20+ years building scalable SaaS platforms. Recently founded Basic Memory LLC, growing it from concept to 2,000+ GitHub stars and 56 paying customers in under 6 months, building one of the first production Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementations. Previously: Engineering Manager/Principal at companies like Fracture (50% AWS cost reduction), Spot Insurance, Pensa (ML/computer vision), and Spanning (100M+ events daily). Strong track record of rapid iteration, technical leadership, and delivering products that generate revenue. Looking for Staff/Principal Engineer or Engineering Manager roles at product companies building developer tools, SaaS platforms, or AI-powered products.
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Senior/Staff/Principal Software Engineer with 20+ years building scalable SaaS platforms. Recently built Basic Memory (basicmemory.com) - an AI-powered knowledge management platform from concept to 2,000+ GitHub stars and 56 paying customers in 6 months.
What I do:
- Full-stack SaaS platform architecture and implementation
- Python/FastAPI backends, modern frontend (React/Vue/TypeScript)
* Claude (and other MCP AIs) can both read from and write to your local markdown files
* Creates a connected network of notes that Claude can navigate between
* All data stays as markdown files on your computer
* When you chat with Claude, it automatically builds structure with simple patterns
* You can start a new chat and just say "Let's continue discussing X" without uploading files or copy/pasting
* Files are available locally, so you can edit them in and editor, like Obsidian, VS Code, etc.
I built this because I was tired of repeating myself to AI assistants and wanted my conversations to accumulate into something useful over time. It's basically a way to give Claude persistent memory while keeping your data local and be easily readable and editable my humans.
Some people are using it to maintain project context across sessions, document systems, and build topic maps without having to manually organize everything.
I use intelij personally (for work and personal development). They also have a standalone product, DataGrip (https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/) with affordable/free pricing.
In the past I've just used raw psql from the console, but having an IDE is a big quality of life improvement IMO.
Experienced developer, leader and creative problem solver, iteratively designing, delivering, and improving software architectures to deliver business value.
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> reference labor theory/the alienation of man from his labor. I wonder if people are simply unaware of the large existing body of work on these issues
I’ve been interested in reading more about this. Do you have any pointers to good info?
I do. I do development all day and it’s not a problem for me. I just run every window maximized under os x with multiple desktops. Easy to close the lid and open it wherever without having to worry about those windows on all the other screens.
I have had this issue with my current golang projects. I haven't found any clear standard for project layout. We have a bunch of microservices with grpc api endpoints, and some which are event driven. Has anyone found a better resource? As it is, even our internal projects are fairly inconsistent in their project structure, which is a bit annoying.
I was trying to work around this problem also and found this library: https://github.com/jOOQ/jOOL, from the guys at Jooq. They did all the hard work to wrap all the FunctionalInterfaces in unchecked exceptions. Hope this helps.
Does anyone have any further information related to the scaling problems they were having with couchdb? This sounds like bad news for couch to lose such a big name brand user.
If he feels like he's tapping in to something deeper, then isn't that enough? It's his experience after all. It doesn't require objective validation, does it?
I'll give a "me too" for not understanding what to do when I got to the site. You should keep in mind the 2 min test - If I can't understand how it works before that, I'll move on.
It looks great, but IMHO, you should consider simplifying.
Edit: Forgot to say +1 for the idea, it looks like it could make my bookmarking useful again. Save me from delicious!
I think a better comparison, is to linux - since it really is a linux kernel underneath, and it is open source. Linux has plenty of flaws, especially with hardware, but anyone can take the code and try and improve it, then contribute back to the main code base. The cyanogenmod is an example of this.
I built Basic Memory — it imports your ChatGPT export and turns it into plain Markdown files. Every conversation becomes a file you can actually read, search, and use with whatever AI you switch to.
This is not an ad. It is free and open source. Your data belongs to you. Keep it.
Steps:
1. Settings → Data Controls → Export Data (ChatGPT emails you a zip)
2. Install Basic Memory (brew tap basicmachines-co/basic-memory && brew install basic-memory)
bm import chatgpt conversations.zip
Complete docs: http://docs.basicmemory.com