I’m currently dealing with a project that involves developing systems where the existing prior art is either completely proprietary and inaccessible, or public, but extremely nacient and thus documented learnings are less developed than our own learnings and designs.

Many projects may have the primary objective of getting something working. But we don’t all have the luxury of being able to declare something working and walk away. I specifically have requirements around long term evolution of our project (I.e. over a 5-10 year time horizon at a minimum), plus long term operational burden and cost. While also delivering value in the short term.

LLM provide are an invaluable tool for exploring the many possible solutions to what we’re building, and helping to evaluate the longer term consequences of our design decisions, before we’ve committed significant resources to developing them completely.

Of course we could do all this without LLMs, but LLMs substantially increase the distance we can explore before timelines force us to commit.