Who owns what your AI knows about you?

Last week, in the comments under one of my LinkedIn posts, someone described how she works with AI.

I replied with something I had only just done. It deserves more than a comment.

I took everything Claude and ChatGPT know about me, and everything they have made for me, and put it in one place that I own.

I call it my vault. Most people would call it a second brain.

Think about what your AI knows about you by now.

Mine knows a lot.

My skills: written instructions for the jobs I do again and again. How I write. Who I serve. How I plan my week.

My memories: the facts it has picked up about me and my work along the way.

And everything it has made. Letters, plans, pages, documents. These letters too.

That took months to build. Every correction. Every "no, not like that".

And all of it lived inside someone else's product.

A good chef changes kitchens many times in a career.

The ovens stay. The pans stay. The walk-in fridge stays.

Two things always leave with the chef. The knife roll, and the notebook of recipes.

My notebook was sitting in somebody else's kitchen.

So I took my copy out.

Here is exactly what I did.

1. One private place. I made a private repository on GitHub. Think of it as a folder that remembers every version of every file. Only I can see it.

2. Everything in. Claude works in projects. For each one, every document, every uploaded file and everything Claude remembers there went into its own folder. My skills, my memories and the things Claude has made for me went in too. So did what ChatGPT knew about me.

3. A night shift. I set up scheduled tasks in Claude. Every night, after 1:49am, one wakes up for each project, a few minutes apart. It reads what changed that day and copies it into the vault. If nothing changed, it does nothing.

4. Read only. Those tasks only read from Claude. They never edit or delete anything there. The vault is a copy, not a replacement.

5. Every change kept. Each night's changes are saved as a new version. If a skill gets worse after an edit, I can see exactly what changed and go back.

That gave me three things.

Versioning. Nothing I have taught my AI can quietly disappear.

A place to look things up. One folder I can open, search and read, outside any chat window.

A way out. Claude is my main tool today. If something better comes along, I won't start from zero.

Then it became more than a backup.

The vault is now the brain my tools read from. I linked Grok straight to it, and it pulls the latest version every time. Whatever I teach Claude today, Grok knows the next morning.

On my website, Claude talks to visitors as me, from the same vault. I set the rules. What people can ask. What it can answer, and what it can't.

Now think about your company.

Your people are teaching AI tools every day. How you price. How you answer a complaint. What you never promise a client.

Some of it sits in one vendor's product. Some in another. Some in a personal account that walks out of the door when the person does.

That is the first kitchen from letter #11. The recipes live in someone's head. Only this time the head belongs to a vendor.

So I'm building the thing I wanted when I started.

It's called Terbos. It does all of the above for you. It sets up your vault step by step, keeps every version, and updates it every night.

And on top of it, a command centre. You give it a job, and it spins up agents that do the specialised work for you. Each one works from your vault, so they already know you.

You never have to open it. You plug it into the AI you already use, Claude, ChatGPT or Grok, and talk to your own brain from there.

I'm building it in public. I'll show you how it started, what I decide, and what breaks.

Two honest warnings.

A vault holds sensitive things. Keep it private, and decide who can see it before you fill it.

And a copy is not a move. A new tool won't read your notebook perfectly on day one. But it starts from your notebook, not from a blank page.

Here is what you can use today.

Open the AI you use most. Find what it remembers about you, and the instructions you have given it.

Copy all of it into one document that you own.

That is your vault, version one. Brute force first, optimise later.

— Yiannis

P.S. Want to be one of the first to use Terbos? Join the waitlist.

Next letter: what my vault does for me every night, and what the command centre looks like on day one.