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Building ShadowTalk AI Solo With Zero Budget: Solving the AI Context Problem

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Hey everyone! I'm Zain Ahmed, the founder of ShadowTalk AI. I'm a solo founder building it independently, with zero funding and essentially no marketing budget.

This is actually one of the problems that inspired me to build ShadowTalk.

I think the biggest issue isn't necessarily that AI agents lack memory. It's that context is fragmented across conversations, tools, clients, and projects.

When you're working on multiple projects, you don't just need an AI to remember facts. You need it to remember:

  • Previous decisions and why they were made.

  • Client-specific requirements and preferences.

  • What has already been completed.

  • What still needs to be done.

  • Which files and conversations belong to each project.

Otherwise, you end up spending time reconstructing context instead of actually doing the work.

That's what I'm trying to solve with ShadowTalk AI: a project-oriented AI workspace that helps people maintain context and continue ongoing work without repeatedly starting from scratch, while keeping control over their AI providers and API keys (BYOK).

I'm building this independently, learning, experimenting, and improving it as I go. It's far from perfect, and I'm still working on making the experience genuinely useful.

I'm curious about how other developers and founders approach this problem:

How do you currently maintain AI context across multiple clients and projects? Do you use a dedicated memory system, Markdown files, a knowledge base, custom scripts, or something else?

I'd genuinely love to learn from your experiences.

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Welcome Zain! Markdown files, in three layers, is my answer. A global rules file that applies to every project (for example, one account no agent may ever use). Per project, a short rules file plus one notes file per area of the app, each finding written down with its reason at the moment it is learned. And a small memory folder of one fact per file with a one line index, for things about how I like to work, which also loads every session. Your list of what context must hold matches mine closely, especially "decisions and why they were made": the why is what gets lost first. The thing plain files lack is what you mention, knowing which conversation belonged to which project.