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)
It took exactly 24 hours, to the minute, from the time I received the "we're generating an export" file until I got the download link, so guessing they're either batching it or deliberately sending after 24 hours because it adds friction to the account deletion process.
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 need to do some tweaking, but for now, It is open for testing purposes. I wrote my custom license, which will be freely available for personal use and provides the right to use commercially it with a small sponsorship.
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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- Consulting Principal Engineer - Empowering Your Team for Success: hands-on mentoring, code review, task estimation and decomposition. Help build a team of 10x engineers, level up engineering processes, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and engineering craftsmanship.
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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 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