The order of operations for a switch

The decision is made and the work is administrative from here. There are six steps, they have a fixed order, and the reason they have a fixed order is that two of them destroy things and one of them stops being possible once the account is closed.

This is the sequence. Every other post on this site is one step in it.

Why the order is the whole problem

A switch has almost no difficult steps and one unforgiving property: some of it cannot be undone. Nothing here requires skill. It requires doing things in a sequence that keeps every irreversible action last.

The failure mode is always the same shape. Someone cancels first because that is the step that feels like the decision, then discovers that the archive they assumed was theirs was only ever a view into an account they no longer have. Nothing was lost by incompetence. It was lost by ordering.

Step one — write down what you have

Before touching anything, spend twenty minutes making an inventory: conversation history, standing instructions, saved prompts, the organisational layer, uploaded files, connected accounts, and any link you handed to another person.

The inventory matters because most of what you will miss is invisible until it is missing. You cannot plan around an item you never listed, and this is the only step where listing them is cheap.

Step two — export, then verify the export

Request the account data export, wait for it, download it, and open it.

The verification is not optional and it is not the same step as the download. An export is a snapshot of the account at the moment it was generated; it never updates, and a file that will not open is indistinguishable from a file that will until you try. Check that the archive is actually complete while you still have an account that can produce another one.

Two practical notes: take the export later rather than earlier, because everything after the snapshot is not in it, and expect to take it more than once.

Step three — rebuild what has no equivalent

Now the part that takes real time. Standing instructions, saved prompts and reference documents do not move, but they are all plain text, which means they can be rebuilt once and then never again.

Do this as files you keep outside any product: an instruction file, a prompt library, and a folder of the documents you re-upload constantly. Then seed the new assistant with them rather than waiting for it to learn.

Step four — replace and revoke what other people and services depend on

Two directions, both easy to forget.

Outward: any conversation link you shared with a colleague, pasted in a ticket or embedded in a document stops working when the account closes. Those have somebody else’s deadline attached, not yours.

Inward: every service the assistant was authorised against still holds that authorisation, and revoking it happens in the other service’s settings, not in the assistant’s. Closing an account does not reliably tidy this up.

Step five — run both, with an end date fixed in advance

A parallel period is the only way to find out what breaks, and it works only if the new assistant is the default and the old one the fallback.

Set the end date before you start, and set it off the renewal date rather than a feeling. A period without an end date is not verification, it is avoidance, and it costs a subscription cycle each time it drifts.

Step six — cancel, and delete only if you mean to

Cancelling and deleting are separate actions with different consequences, and only the second one destroys data.

Cancel when the parallel period ends and the export has been verified. Delete only if you have a reason beyond tidiness, and only after confirming the archive is somewhere that does not depend on that account. Also confirm what you are cancelling: a consumer subscription and API access are separate products with separate billing, and stopping one does not stop the other.

What moves

WHAT MOVES — the sequence itself

  · Conversation text
                    → exports at step two. Snapshot only,
                      never updated afterwards.

  · Instructions, prompts, reference files
                    → rebuilt at step three as files you
                      own. Portable from then on.

  · Everything created after the snapshot
                    → STAYS BEHIND unless you export
                      again. This is why step two
                      repeats.

  · Accumulated context on the old side
                    → STAYS BEHIND. No step recovers it.

  · Cancelling before verifying the export
                    → IRREVERSIBLE in effect. Archive
                      access commonly depends on an
                      active account.

  · Deleting the account
                    → IRREVERSIBLE. Removes the source
                      of every item above.

The two orderings people get wrong

Cancelling before verifying. The most expensive one, and it looks like efficiency at the time. The export request and the cancellation are minutes apart in the same settings area, which is exactly why they get done together.

Rebuilding after cancelling. Less catastrophic, more annoying. Your old instructions and saved prompts live in the old account, and reading them is how you find out what they said. Do the rebuilding while the source is still readable.

What is lost regardless

Following the sequence perfectly still loses you the accumulated context — the year of incidental knowledge the old assistant had about your work, which has no export format anywhere and will not appear on the other side.

The sequence does not prevent that. It prevents everything else, which is the part that was preventable.