Ethan Mollick let GPT-6 Astra autonomously build his second brain over 5 days
tomcrawshaw01 · x · 2026-09-08
A breakdown of Ethan Mollick's real experiment: he gave GPT-6 Astra tens of thousands of his emails, years of writing and his calendar, then left it alone for five days.
- Fully autonomous: Astra chose its own tooling, downloaded the software it needed, built a personal knowledge base of his contacts, ideas and career history, and decided how to keep updating it — none of it designed by Mollick
- Why it matters: a genuine experiment on real work data, and the clearest illustration of the cost every "let the AI remember everything" pitch skips past
- The right approach: one pass through your own history, reviewed by you, filed into a Hermes vault
Takeaway: agents can already build memory systems autonomously, but the trade-offs of full unsupervised operation deserve scrutiny.
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