NotebookLM has been one of the most reliable tools in my stack for over a year now. Like most of you probably, it’s where I go when I’ve got a pile of, well, anything to make sense of. However, reliability and versatility aren’t the same things. NotebookLM is built around a fairly rigid idea of how research should go – you bring it a clean set of sources and it works strictly within them. When you veer off that path the sessions can start to get frustrating pretty quickly.