MOVING YOUR AI WORK SOMEWHERE ELSE - START HERE
Version 1.1, 26 October 2026.
Created by Hans Tandt - hanstandt.be. Licence: MIT - free to use, copy and adapt.

For any assistant: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or the next one.
The companion folder one level up does the same job for Claude Code only,
in much more detail, with real file names and paths.


WHAT IS IN THIS FOLDER

  READ_ME_FIRST.txt                      this file
  1_EXPORT_PROMPT.txt                    paste into the OLD assistant
  2_IMPORT_PROMPT.txt                    paste into the NEW assistant
  Moving_Any_AI_To_Another_PC_EN.pdf     the manual, English
  Moving_Any_AI_To_Another_PC_EN.docx        (same, editable)
  Moving_Any_AI_To_Another_PC_FR.pdf     the manual, French
  Moving_Any_AI_To_Another_PC_FR.docx        (same, editable)
  source\                                to rebuild the manual after an edit

  The two prompts are .txt on purpose. You paste them into a chat box, so
  there is nothing to render, and a text file opens on any computer with
  nothing installed and nothing to choose.


FIRST, WHICH CASE ARE YOU IN

  1. Same assistant, same account, new computer.
     Sign in. Everything is already there. You can stop reading.

  2. Same assistant, a NEW account.
     Your conversations can be handed over as a document. What it remembers,
     your instructions and your saved assistants do NOT move. Carry on below.

  3. A different assistant.
     Nothing moves by itself. Carry on below, and allow more time.

  Chapter 2 of the manual explains the three cases with a picture.


THE SHORT VERSION

  ON THE OLD ASSISTANT
  1. Open the chat that holds the work, so it still has the conversation
     in front of it.
  2. Paste 1_EXPORT_PROMPT.txt (only between the marker rows) as ONE message.
  3. It asks six questions. Answer them.
  4. It then works through seven steps and waits for your "go" each time.
  5. Save every file it gives you into one folder. That folder is what you
     carry across. If it cannot write files itself, it prints them and you
     save them by hand.
     Keep them as separate files, NOT in a zip. Many assistants read .md
     files you drop into a conversation but will not look inside a zip -
     and dropping them in the chat is exactly how you hand them over.
     Sending them over a network? Zip for the journey, unzip before use.

  ON THE NEW ASSISTANT
  6. Paste 2_IMPORT_PROMPT.txt as ONE message.
  7. It asks four questions, then works through six steps.
  8. Make it say the work back to you in its own words, and correct it now.
  9. Ask it what it can still remember tomorrow. Write down the answer.
 10. Run the four questions in chapter 8 of the manual and compare the
     answers with the old assistant's.


IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT AN .md FILE IS

  That is fine, and it changes nothing. An .md file is a plain text file.
  You can open it in Notepad and read it like a letter. The prompt creates
  them and fills them in for you. You only save them and read them back.

  Why bother at all? If you only ever chat with an assistant, you do not
  have to. But using an assistant is much more than chatting. The moment
  you build something, or keep a project going for weeks, these files are
  the memory - and they are the only part that belongs to you. Start a
  Session_Notes.md on day one of a project, not on the day you move.

  Chapter 5.1 of the manual explains it in one page, including the Windows
  trap that saves your file as Session_Notes.md.txt without telling you.


THE THREE THINGS PEOPLE GET WRONG

  AN EXPORT IS NOT A BACKUP. You can get a file out of most assistants.
  There is no button anywhere that puts it back - not into another account,
  not into another assistant. An export you cannot restore is a souvenir.

  THE MEMORY HAS NO EXPORT BUTTON. The part that makes an assistant feel
  like it knows you is the part you cannot export. You open it in the
  settings and copy it out by hand - and even that list is not complete.

  THE TOOLS DO NOT TRAVEL. Plug-ins, connectors and programs never arrive
  with your files. The work then fails in a way that looks like the
  assistant being stupid, when really the workbench is missing a tool.


DO NOT DELETE ANYTHING YET

  Keep the old conversation, the old account and the old computer until the
  work really runs in the new place. Test first, delete afterwards.

  If something is missing, ask the NEW assistant what it needs, tell it
  which assistant you came from by name, and ask it to write you a prompt
  to paste into the OLD one. That only works while the old side still
  exists. Chapter 9 of the manual.


A WORD OF WARNING

  This is built on real experience, and it tries to cover everything that
  went wrong in practice. It will not cover everything that can go wrong.
  These tools change every month and every project is different. Treat it
  as a careful starting point, not as a guarantee.


TO REBUILD THE MANUAL AFTER AN EDIT

  Edit source\content_EN.json or content_FR.json, then:

      py "%USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\general-report-builder\tools\build_with_toc.py" source\content_EN.json Moving_Any_AI_To_Another_PC_EN

  It writes the .docx and the .pdf together. For French, run the typography
  pass first. If you change a figure, run source\figures\make_figures.py.

  Licence: MIT - free to use, copy and adapt.
