Elicit vs Claude: The Papers Tool Beat the Generalist at One Job

I asked Claude and Elicit the same research question. Claude gave a competent essay with a couple of papers. Elicit gave me fifty studies with the sentences, in one view, and I got oriented in minutes.

Claude is a brilliant generalist, but a literature survey isn't generalist work, it's extraction across a corpus it can't see. Elicit reads the papers; Claude reads your prompt and guesses.

The overlap is 'find sources,' and there Elicit wins on breadth and receipts. Claude wins when I've read the sources and need help thinking about them, which is a later step, not the survey.

For surveying a field, Elicit. For reasoning about what you found, Claude. Using Claude to scan fifty PDFs is like using a chef to peel potatoes, it'll do it, badly, and resentfully.