The Case for Owning and Growing Your Own Context

The Uncomfortable Truth

Most people spend most of their time producing something — some output, some artifact, some thing they trade for recognition, pay, value. The uncomfortable truth: most of us will (sooner or later) be forced to grapple with the question — what happens when AI produces what I produce, better than I do?

If you think AI will progress, the timelines don't matter. Sooner or later, most of us will have to grapple with the fact that AI can probably do our current job as good as us. This will make us reconsider what it is that we actually do.

Why Context Matters

Access to raw intelligence is rapidly increasing. Language models and whatever comes next are democratizing intelligence itself. What matters now isn't the accumulation of intelligence — it's the allocation of intelligence. Understanding how to leverage this intelligence is another thing entirely.

Context is what lets you allocate intelligence effectively. It's the web of connections between ideas, the history of how your thinking evolved, the specific domain knowledge that makes general intelligence useful for your problems.

The Vendor Lock-In Problem

When you use any of the major providers — ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — your conversations live on their servers. The connections you make (how one idea links to another, where a thought came from, how your thinking changed) sit in silicon-stacked server racks somewhere in Virginia, Texas, California, or Washington.

This isn't an accident; it's just misaligned incentives. These platforms aren't incentivized to help you build portable, reusable records. Their success depends on engagement and retention, not on you owning a growing, compounding knowledge base.

The Solution

Ra-h is one approach to solving this problem, but the fundamental idea matters more than any specific tool. If you have the capacity to build your own system, do it. The critical piece is simple: a vendor-neutral database that you control.

That's it. Your context shouldn't live in someone else's silo. It should compound over time, independent of whatever AI provider you choose to query. As AI becomes more capable, your context becomes the moat — the thing that makes general intelligence specifically yours.