Comment by epistasis
20 hours ago
This is exactly true, I get annoyed by Claude one day and switch to something else, and the only thing that's ever keeping me tied towards Claude is the ability to search my old chats easily.
But Claude also makes it really hard to do that, so what am I even really paying for? Time to extract all my data, put it into a sqlite with FTS5 and make sure I never rely on the overly-opinionated, low-thinking PMs from these giant orgs again.
Of course, that "easy" step has lots of partial solutions like CTK (Conversation Toolkit) or MyChatArchive and I haven't found the perfect one yet, ideally it'd be something that dumped everything into Obsidian or an Obsidian-alike, but surely somebody is working on that? I'd pay $5/month for somebody to solve that problem for me, as long as I still owned the data...
Claude by default deletes old chats after a few months. I installed a custom end-of-session hook that throws chat transcripts into a database so that any model can read any other model's chat history. Super easy
> search my old chats easily
Don't rely on chat history. Have it write and maintain summary files that you can import into different sessions, at least for anything important.
Just use a proxy and log everything.
A proxy only catches stuff going forward and it doesn't provide me chat search and chat viewing.
What I'm doing instead: syncing coding agent sessions to a central backup location, and for cloud LLM chat providers I'm occasionally exporting data.
Still need something to automate that syncing, and provide search and viewing.
> the ability to search my old chats easily.
I’d try:
1 exporting my data (I imagine it’s common outside of GDPR?)
2 asking Claude to convert it to an easily digestible format :)