i’m deep in my senior engineering capstone right now (legacy vlsi fault models and lte diversity architectures). searching for actual technical specs on google just gives me endless seo-farmed vendor ads. so, i spent the last month testing basically every AI research tool to see what actually works and what is paywalled garbage. here is the brutally honest breakdown of my stack: claude(2/5): banned for raw search. they are hallucination engines that confidently invent fake IEEE DOIs. however, they are goated if you manually upload the PDFs yourself. https://claude.ai/ perplexity(2.5/5): used to be the goat, but feels incredibly nerfed lately. it just lazily scrapes the top three seo blogs it finds now instead of actually digging… https://www.perplexity.ai/ scira(4/5): my daily driver for general technical search. it’s an open-source, and privacy-focused AI search engine. it bypasses the seo trash and forces strict, clickable inline citations to real PDFs, so i don’t get gaslit by fake references before pasting them into my doc. https://scira.ai/ Elicit (3/5): amazing for extracting data (methodology, p-values) into spreadsheets, but the free tier is basically non-existent now. https://elicit.com/ scispace(4/5) really solid copilot specifically for decoding dense math and formulas in VLSI papers. https://scispace.com/ researchrabbi(3.5/5)t: not technically generative AI, but you absolutely need these. you plug in one good seed paper, and it builds a visual spiderweb graph of every paper that cited it or was cited by it. saves hours of digging. https://www.researchrabbit.ai/ consensus(4/5):god-tier if you only need strict, peer-reviewed academic papers. useless if you need to search github or old hardware forums. https://consensus.app/ tl;dr: avoid raw chatbots, use elicit/scispace for decoding, connected papers for finding related lit, and scira to bypass google’s seo trash without getting hallucinated citations. what does your actual stack look like right now? am i missing any obscure open-source tools? i feel like i’m fighting the internet just to read a damn spec sheet. submitted by /u/Public_Mortgage6241
Originally posted by u/Public_Mortgage6241 on r/ArtificialInteligence