“I wanted to build a system where I was confident that AI was grounded in my truth and knowing what it knows about me, so that I could be confident in the advice it was giving me back. So instead of the chat interface, I switched over to a coding agent. In Claude Code, I built this system that would read and write Markdown files, so they would have the memory of what we were talking about, and it would live on my computer.”
Lenny's Newsletter · Product & Design · November 2026
Context
Claire Vo asked what problem he was solving with his household setup. Farrar explains his unease with chat tools, never knowing what the model remembers about him, and why he moved his family's information into plain files a coding agent can read and write.
Transcript
Busy, busy adulting.
…Everybody always asks, like, we need more parents on. We need more people handling their busy lives. And so when I saw some of the stuff that you were doing, I was so excited for you to demo it for us. So walk us through what your busy adulting looks like and what problem you were trying to solve.
I have kids. I've got a career and it's like hard to juggle everything. And if I come up with a question like, oh, should I, do I have the right car insurance? Do I need to change that? You know, lots of like lots of people, I might come to AI. I might go to the chat and have it help me out. But the problem I was having there is if I start doing a complex problem with chat, it's like, well, do I dump my information in there? Do I give it all the context into this chat here? And as the conversation goes, is it drifting? What is it really remembering about me? So I wanted to build a system where I was confident that AI was grounded in my truth and knowing what it knows about me so that I could be confident in what advice it was giving me back. So what I did, instead of just going with the chat interface, switching over to a coding agent. So in Claude Code, I built this system that would read and write files, read and write markdown files. So they would have the memory of what we were talking about. And it would be living on my computer so that if I come back later and start a new chat session, a cloud code session, it can reference those same files. So if I, here's kind of a sample of the car insurance…
So, the problem that you're trying to solve here really is when you're using like the web, you know, Chat GPT or Claude, you're like, what does it really know about me? What does it really remember? What information does it have? Like, that is very opaque to most people. But once you download these…
What I started with was just saying, well, should I should I update this? And in the conversation or an updating another insurance, it says, well, one of these people giving you a quote said, you need to update the cars. And if you also wanted this other policy, and in the previous years, I might…
And I mean, how would you have done this before? Because I'll tell you exactly how I would have done it before. I wouldn't have done it.
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