The Problem
I changed jobs. The knowledge base my agents run on still described the old one: who I report to, whose preferences to write for, which brand voice to use, and 32,000 files of the old company’s work. Nothing had bled into my new work in the first week. What I worried about was one case. I’m short on time, working on something for the CEO, and the word “CEO” sets off routines that assume my old CEO.The Approach
My first plan was a clean new baseline vault, something I could open in Obsidian on my phone whenever I wanted. But it would have meant updating so many other things, changing where I’m used to opening my terminal windows and which folders are attached to my apps. When I looked at the migration plan, it wasn’t that much stuff, and only some things needed the information stripped out. So I kept the vault. I asked Claude for an inventory: every folder and file to move out, every line in the always-loaded instruction files that named the old company, and every script that would break once those files were gone. I read all of it and overrode a few of its recommendations. My personal folder stays whole. The folder structure stays, so new work has somewhere to go. The battlecard skills stay, stripped of the old company. The old brand-voice guide becomes a general copywriting skill.What Happened
The inventory found three problems. A nightly job that draws random old notes together and looks for connections nobody has written down had the old company’s project folder hard-coded as one of its sources, and it exits with an error when a source comes back empty. Moving the folder would have stopped it that night, so Claude pointed it at any project folder first. The weekly health check also required that folder to exist and would have reported a failure. The inventory also found a 4.3 GB hidden copy of the whole knowledge base, made by a coding agent’s checkpoint feature I didn’t know was running. I had it deleted. Claude moved the files out of the synced drive and checked the file count for every item it moved. Two background agents rewrote the instruction files and the skills, and a third checked their claims against the disk. Because of how the folders were set up, stripping the old company out was simple.What I Learned
It was interesting to find which of my automations and little systems were failing or out of date. I also saw that a system built up for one job can take on a new focus, and it got me excited about what other tools and workflows I could add to it. It also changed how I think about the agent I set up with Claude this year to keep up with the flow of information: monitoring channels, checking email replies, looking at the calendar, reading a database and Slack threads overnight to write me prompts for the morning. The product I work on now has a home screen that does this. It gives me a morning brief with pre-created prompts based on the DMs and mentions that came in overnight. That’s what I always wanted my own setup to do, so I don’t need to run it the same way here. This move started as a thought experiment three weeks earlier: What would follow me to a new job.Drafted by my Claude from our working session. I edited and approved it.