When it comes to AI Memory, everyone's arguing "RAG vs. grep" like it's a religious war. It's not. It's just a cost curve. I've gotten this question so many times that I thought I'd just share my thoughts. So here goes:
Vector search wins when your corpus is massive, messy, and unstructured. Thousands of docs, no clean boundaries, meaning matters more than exact words.
Filesystem plus grep wins when your corpus is structured and actually yours. A folder of markdown files you can open, read, and audit line by line. No infra required.
Anthropic already ran this experiment in production. Claude Code dropped its RAG pipeline for plain agentic search (grep, glob, read) and it outperformed the vector pipeline on real work. Not close.
But the benchmark wars are missing the actual point. It was never about picking one. It's about knowing what each layer is for.
Markdown is your source of truth. Portable, human readable, greppable, not locked to one provider. Memory you can actually own and move.
Vector search is an accelerant on top of that truth. A fast index for when the haystack gets too big for exact match to keep up.
Use either one alone and it breaks down:
- Markdown alone stalls at scale and struggles with paraphrasing or fuzzy recall
- Vectors alone turn your memory into a black box you can't read, audit, or export
The next step for memory infrastructure isn't picking a side. It's the filesystem as the ledger and RAG as the index on top of it, so memory stays legible and portable, and still fast when it needs to be.
This is the exact direction we're building with AI Context Flow: markdown as the portable, ownable source of truth, with retrieval layered on top instead of replacing it.
If your memory only exists as embeddings inside someone else's vector DB, that's not memory. That's a lease.
Which team are you on?
AI Context Flow
@rajan_batra3 Mostly from linkedin but some from reddit too. I am very active on linkedin and have been in the IT space for 10+ years so have a large personal network.
I did a poll that how many AI tools do you use per week, then reached out to the ones that said 3-5 per week.
Wow, I didn’t realize how much we need this until we saw it. Thank you@hira_siddiqui1 and congratulations!
We do find ourselves asking differentAI agents the same questions, wasting tokens trying to find the best prompt to use and have to explain ourselves over and over.
And we are still not using AI as a source of truth, thankfully, but having them cross reference and constructively criticize each other has been very productive. The manual copy-pasting and massaging our messaging really does take a lot of extra effort! We’re for sure going to be implementing this into our workflow.
Questions: What are your next steps for scaling? Beyond the Chrome extension, is there another platform or niche you think would be a good fit for your product?
AI Context Flow
@sb_wc_labs our bigger vision is to build an open context layer - a user-owned portable memory layer where users can take their memory with them wherever they go!
Next up is MCP servers and "Sign in with AI" SDK.
You can read about the bigger vision and our "why" in my post here
@hira_siddiqui1 The main reason I am always skeptical about integrations are that I'm not sure if my data is safe. How would you bridge this issue?
AI Context Flow
@devanshi_jhaveri we are integrating with Trusted Execution Environments and your data always stays end to end encrypted.
We also plan to open source our extension soon so everyone can audit there is nothing else happening there.
AI Context Flow
@ihatzis would love if you try it out and let me know if it helped you! :)
AI Context Flow
@ihatzis some early users are reclaiming 5+ hours a week!
This is a sweet product Hira! One question: do you see AI-natuve browsers as strong competition, especially since this is the main thing they're also aiming to do?
AI Context Flow
@pamir_sevincel2 glad you asked this! We see them as validation more than competition.
Different moats: They need users to switch browsers (huge friction). We work where people already are - Chrome, any browser, any AI tool.
We're platform-agnostic by design. Users already jump between ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity daily. AI browsers you into one browser's AI. We give you portable memory across all of them.
Chrome has 69% share, changing browser behavior is incredibly hard. But everyone's already using multiple AI tools - that fragmentation is exactly what makes a universal memory layer valuable. Plus, if AI-native browsers take off, they'll still need memory/context infrastructure. We could easily be a partner or acquisition target for them.
@samin_asef It seems there are different buckets you can create for different memory projects
I have used this recently. I am an engineer and a doctoral student, yet a researcher. In this field as a researcher, I need to use different AI tools for different types of work. So, it is very hectic to explain all the work again and again to different AI by typing the same prompts, which is time-consuming, and you might miss some details while typing. For this, I used AI Context flow in my research. It provided a memory layer by which I can use different AI tools at the same time by giving a prompt to only one. The results were good.
It has optimised my research work. It considers all previous prompts given in AI chats and then tries to give an optimised reply. Since we need different responses from different AI chat sources, we need to explain all the previous history and data and write prompts again and again, but by using this extension, the work has been made easier. It is now easy to get an response altogether from all AI chat sources ^-^
A good initiation by great minds, but it can be improved more in terms of giving optimised responses so that it provides short, concise, yet meaningful responses.
AI Context Flow
@sehrish_shoukat exactly, different AI tools are good at different tasks. Knowledge workers and researchers know this and hence 60% of them are switching between 3-5 different AI tools per week, wasting over 5 hours per week.
We intend to give this lost time back to the people!