S01E03: How to Clone Your Brain — 3 Second-Brain Paradigms Tested Head-to-Head
Same corpus, same 7 questions, three architectures. Production RAG hallucinated. Gemini 1M-context aced the hardest question and ran out of budget on others. The /opt + Claude Code setup I already had won on faithfulness. Closes Season 1: Building My AI Twin.
Audio recording is on the calendar. The full lab report with the data is already published — read it now.
📖 Read the Full Lab ReportShow Notes
Episode Pending
Audio recording is on the calendar. The full lab report comparing three second-brain paradigms — production RAG, Gemini 1M-context, and the /opt + Claude Code setup — is already published. Read it for the data and the live Ask CTAIO embed; come back here for the audio version.
What I Tested
- Ask CTAIO — production RAG. OpenAI text-embedding-3-small + sqlite-vec + gpt-4.1-mini. Live at ctaio.dev/en/ask-ctaio/. 2 of 7 wins.
- Gemini 2.5 Pro long-context dump — paste 705k tokens, no retrieval, ask. 1 of 7 wins (the hardest question every other paradigm got wrong).
- File-based + Claude Code (Karpathy LLM Wiki) — markdown files in /opt + agent with Read/Grep. 5 of 7 wins.
Three Failure Modes
- RAG fails by confabulation — Q4 returned a fabricated 'ElevenLabs shutdown rumour' that does not exist anywhere.
- Long-context fails by budget exhaustion — internal 'thinking' burned the entire output token budget on hard questions.
- File-based fails by vocabulary mismatch — case-sensitive grep for 'the wrong story' missed the H1 'Is the Wrong Story.' But it flagged the failure honestly.
The Working-Memory Probe
Five-turn conversation. Turn 1 set a rule: 'never include specific dollar figures.' Turn 5 asked about CAIO comp. The system returned full dollar figures. Architectural cause: 6-message rolling history cap. Sfeir's 'working-memory gap' demonstrated reproducibly.
Total Experiment Spend
$4.30 across all three systems for the full 7-question battery + working-memory probe.
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