A very useful thing I found is the following: take a couple hours thinking about interesting research ideas. Work out with chatgpt existing solutions and identify key publications. Use Claude code to modify existing software to do something new. In one day of work you got a proof of concept of whether your idea may work. Of course from there on you have to work it out and make it good, but having a confirmation quickly completely changes the fact that you normally have to go through dozens of papers and take several months to review existing publications on the topic.