The AI Harness Is the Lock-In. Own Yours.

Your personal data should live on your own computer, where you own it and you decide what it's used for. Not inside a cloud AI vendor's memory that's gone when you switch providers. This is the positioning statement for Typewriter, my open-source, local-first starter kit for a personal knowledge assistant. It started when an LLM kept forgetting who I was, so I built memory of my own. When I showed the system to Perplexity, the answer was that this is how they organize their own system: files and folders holding markdown instructions. That told me I was on the right track. It also showed me where the business is. The harness, meaning the memory and context an AI platform keeps about you, is how providers lock customers in. Over the past year Manus, then Perplexity Computer, and now Grok and Muse have started offering cloud-based computer instances. But, you can run your own computer with your own history faster and cheaper. Typewriter is for anyone who values their stories, work, journals, thoughts, and conversations enough to keep them local, build on them, and use them with whichever LLM they choose. Chapters 0:00 — Your data, your computer: why I built my own AI memory 0:33 — Perplexity's files-and-folders moment, and the harness as lock-in 1:07 — When ChatGPT guesses too much, and the rise of cloud computers 1:38 — Run your own: who Typewriter is for 2:09 — Seeing your own interview reflected back to you Links Repo: https://github.com/duhring/typewriter Substack: https://johnduhring.substack.com/p/th...