A few months ago I noticed something annoying about how I worked: I was spending more time collecting information than actually thinking about it.
The pattern was always the same. Open a search engine, open a dozen tabs, skim past the SEO filler and cookie banners, copy the paragraphs that actually mattered into a doc, paste the whole mess into an LLM and ask it to make sense of things. Then, a week later, do it again because whatever I was tracking had changed.
At some point I stopped asking "how do I do this faster" and started asking why I was doing it by hand at all.
Why the obvious answers didn't work
ChatGPT and Perplexity are fine for a single question. They're worse at the part I actually needed help with, which was repetition: running the same research loop on a schedule, keeping a record of what changed, and getting a notification when it did. Neither tool is built to sit in the background and check on a topic for you.
