After 7 billion tokens and 40,000+ prompts, here is the biggest realization of my LLM journey.
Your memory and your prompts aren't just storage anymore. They're about to become a currency — one that pays compounding returns over time. But only if you start making deposits now.
Do this
Right from day one, create a structured, interconnected memory bank on your own device. Then watch it grow.
Why bother
- Save time and get faster output
- Save tokens
- Save context
- Get better results
- Compound your output over time
- Future-proof yourself against a potential LLM migration ⚠️
Models are improving so fast that tomorrow's launch could cost a hundredth of today's — and make yesterday's setup obsolete overnight.
If that day comes, your memory bank becomes a plug-and-play migration tool. You carry your years of work, your skills, your patterns, and your style across to whatever comes next, and you lose none of it.
How to start
- Hardcode a skill for your LLM — a skill.md file it always follows.
- Point it at free tools like Obsidian or Notion and have it build a hyper-efficient memory bank. Not just for today, but for the decades ahead.
Here's my actual setup
Concretely, this is the shape mine takes. Not the contents — the structure.
- One fact per file. Small, single-purpose notes, each with a short description at the top so the machine can decide what's relevant without opening everything.
- An index that's always loaded. A single map-of-content file the model reads every session — one line per note. It never holds the content, only the pointers.
- Wikilinks between notes. Related facts link to each other, so the bank behaves like a graph, not a folder. Pull one thread and the connected ones come with it.
- Hardcoded skills. A handful of skill.md files the assistant always follows — how I work, what to file where, what never to touch. This is the part that makes it feel like my assistant, not a generic one.
- It writes through automatically. The place the model saves memories is linked to the real store, so saving a fact the normal way just lands it in the bank. No copy step, no drift.
Free tools do all of this. The point was never the tool — it's the discipline of making a deposit every single time you learn something worth keeping.
Here's the part most people miss. The ones who'll be running circles around everyone else in five years aren't the ones with the best prompts. They're the ones who never stopped making deposits.