u/Old-Low629

I have been doing intensive research for one of my SaaS idea. And it has been 1.5months of doing it with Claude, Gemini AI, perplexity, Grok.
So far, all these LLMs have been listing my competitors list so wrongly. I was going in a complete different direction, as my own research by googling & referring multiple other sources also suggested the same & i thought the list was legit.
But now ran the same research on GLM 5.2.
Damn, it actually pulled out the right competitors that even google search couldn’t help me. I am completely shocked now. My claude subscription has also ended & i am not re-subscribing for the time being. Lets see, how long GLM 5.2 hooks me onto. Fingers crossed🤞

ok so I m a big reader. nonfiction mostly. and I ve spent genuinely embarrassing amounts of time trying to fix how i read.

current setup: book open, notion for notes, readwise getting highlights, anki waiting for cards ill never actually make, and use Internet for when i completely lose the thread & then obsidian sync.

the app switching alone frustrates me. ill be mid chapter, have a thought, open notion to write it down, forget what i was thinking, go back to the book, reread the last two paragraphs, have the thought again, get distracted by the notion tab, and now its been 20 mins and ive read one page.

and then a week later someone asks me about the book, i have nothing. like genuinely nothing. not because i didnt read it. because the reading and the thinking never happened at the same time. they happened in different apps at different times and the connection just got lost somewhere between them.

does anyone else have this problem or have you guys actually figured out something that works. not looking for generic advice just genuinely curious what other peoples setups look like who has this problem?

ok so I m a big reader. nonfiction mostly. and I ve spent genuinely embarrassing amounts of time trying to fix how i read.

current setup: book open, notion for notes, readwise getting highlights, anki waiting for cards ill never actually make, and use Internet for when i completely lose the thread & then obsidian sync.

the app switching alone frustrates me. ill be mid chapter, have a thought, open notion to write it down, forget what i was thinking, go back to the book, reread the last two paragraphs, have the thought again, get distracted by the notion tab, and now its been 20 mins and ive read one page.

and then a week later someone asks me about the book, i have nothing. like genuinely nothing. not because i didnt read it. because the reading and the thinking never happened at the same time. they happened in different apps at different times and the connection just got lost somewhere between them.

does anyone else have this problem or have you guys actually figured out something that works. not looking for generic advice just genuinely curious what other peoples setups look like who has this problem?

so for context I was that person solving 3-4 problems a day, feeling productive, then blanking out on a similar problem two weeks later. classic.

I changed my approach about 2 months back. instead of just solving and moving on, I started using a prompting strategy with an LLM to break down every problem after I solved it. not to get the answer but to dissect why the answer works and why my first instinct didn't.

here's what the breakdown looks like for a problem like Longest Consecutive Sequence (128):

- what was my first wrong instinct (sorting ,because consecutive feels like a sorted problem)

- why that instinct felt correct (sorting gives implicit adjacency lookup)

- what observation bridges the gap (I don't need sorting, I need fast lookup -> HashSet)

- the actual trick most people miss (only count from sequence starts where n-1 doesn't exist)

- why not union find, why not sorting & actual tradeoffs not just it's slower

- what signals in the problem should've tipped me off earlier (unsorted + consecutive + O(n) = hashset territory)

- 3-5 similar problems and why they're similar, not just also uses hashset

ngl the 'wrong first intuition' part is the most useful thing I've ever done for DSA. because that's literally what happens in interviews & your brain jumps to the obvious thing and you need to know why it's wrong and what to pivot to. writing that down (or having it generated and then reviewing it) rewires how you think.

the connections between problems is the other big one. I used to see each problem as isolated. now I have this mental graph.

I've done this for ~50 problems and honestly it's been more useful than the 200 I grinded before without this approach.

Key things: solving the problem is maybe 30% of the learning. the breakdown after is where it actually sticks. Useing the LLM to actually teach u the way no one would.

Have been using Claude for everything, but lately it has been pushing back a lot on everything even if it is not completely true & it stores that context throughout that chat & maintains the same & doesnt change its view. It is being a difficult coworker for me. GPT 5.5 is good (not that great tho) & hate its writing style, it is always giving me one word bullet points. So need something between Claude & gpt 5.5 if it exists.

Here are the reasons:

1. I was using Gemini. deep research as so many people were praising it. Initially I thought it pulls a lot of good resources & assumed it was good until I verified the facts it states. For my competitors research, it completely pulled out a wrong competitor & also stated its name wrongly & their niche is only 10% match of mine(verified it with the sources it cited & also searched google)

2. It is so bad at following instructions - I thought it s one of the best for image generation. For my product's logo design, it was giving some crappy designs while the same prompt in chatgpt outperformed my thoughts.

3. Now with the outline of logo (chatgpt's version), I thought atleast by giving a reference image it would do perform well now, & checked it by exactly giving the pixel area & what has to be changed. But it totally changed that logo design. And then I tried mentioning not to do this , do only "Y" (was even more specific). But it kept on going wronger.

From my experience, not even 10% of match with what I expected vs how it performed.