---
title: Own the infrastructure and test the model
date: 2026-10-04
place: Vancouver, BC
author: Sean Bruce-Hayes
---

# Own the infrastructure and test the model

Dan Martell has tested over five hundred AI tools. He publishes the ten that actually matter, rates the models, tells you what to move to. The content's good. It's also different every few months, because the answer keeps changing.

He posted about ChatGPT recently. The comments were full of people saying they'd already switched to Claude. Because of him. He'd moved them there, and now he's over here, and they're stuck with the thing he told them to buy last time.

Nobody in that thread was debating the models. They were comparing which app they'd moved into.

That's the problem. Your context lives in the Claude app. Your projects, your history, the way you've set everything up. It's all sitting inside one company's product. When the next model is better, and it will be, you've got nowhere to take any of it.

The framework I work to is 60/30/10, and that's not mine. It's Jake Van Clief's. He wrote the research paper on Interpretable Context Methodology, which is the actual engineering behind why folder structure works as agent architecture. Most people in this space are selling prompts. Jake's the one who went and did the work on why the structure around the model matters more than the model. If you're building anything with AI and you haven't gone through his stuff, start there.

His breakdown: sixty percent of anything that works is data and how it's organised. Thirty is orchestration, the rules about what happens when. Ten percent is the model call. Everyone's arguing about the ten percent.

So the organisation is the asset, not the tool. Mine is folders and markdown files in git or on my laptop. Named properly, structured so a model can find its way around without being told twice. Data can sit in Supabase, or Firebase, or something you build cheaper. Doesn't matter much. What matters is it's mine and anything can read it.

I was messing around with a Grok bot last week. No plan, just curious. Pointed it at a project I was in the middle of and it was up to speed in seconds. Nothing to migrate, no export, no rebuild. It read the same files everything else reads.

That's not Grok being clever. There was just nothing in the way.

> If switching models would be a project for you, you don't have a system. You've got a subscription.

The models will keep passing each other. Someone will post next month that the new one is better and they'll probably be right. The question isn't which one wins. It's whether you're set up to just go and use it.

> Own the infrastructure, test the model.