Wood Screws and the Methods of Rationality

In order to attach two pieces of particleboard to each other using corner braces, I needed to drive some wood screws into the particleboard. But what size pilot hole should I drill for my #8 screws? I only had my phone handy, and on its limited screen I couldn't find any obvious answers from Google. The size charts I saw referenced hardwoods and softwoods, but made no mention of engineered materials like particleboard. Not finding a straight answer from a web search, I turned to LLMs. Six of them in fact. I posed the following query to Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Meta AI, DeepSeek and Kimi: I am driving a #8 wood screw into particleboard. What size pilot hole do I need to drill? The question was deliberately left somewhat ambiguous. I wanted to see how various LLMs would handle the ambiguity and how they'd react to follow-up responses. Gemini (Gemini 3.1 Pro, Thinking level: extended) insisted on a 3/32" [2] pilot hole. Its logic was that the screw threads should have maximum contact with the particleboard fibers, and therefore a smaller hole, just a bit smaller than the root of the screw, was the best option. When asked follow up questions, it too didn't change its recommendation, and insisted that reduces structural integrity of particleboard means that it should be treated more like an ultra-soft softwood rather than a hardwood. While it mentioned a 7/64" pilot hole as a possibility, it insisted that 3/32" was the best starting point. ChatGPT (ChatGPT 5.5, Thinking, effort level: extended), on the other hand, insisted that the pilot hole should be 1/8". It said that particleboard is brittle and behaves more like a hardwood, and therefore a larger hole size is necessary. While it said that 7/64" is a possibility, it recommended 1/8" to minimize the risk of cracking the board. It did