[buzarchitect]

This matches my experience. I've been building structured pipelines around LLMs, and the biggest lesson is that the raw model is maybe 30% of the value. The other 70% is the methodology you wrap around it; what data you feed in before the conversation starts, what you do when the model gives a weak answer, and whether you track open questions and circle back to them.

The irony is that "extreme amounts of guidance" is exactly what makes a human domain expert valuable, too. A senior consultant isn't smarter than a junior one; they have a better methodology for directing attention to what matters. The actual problem with the "just throw an agent at it" approach isn't cost. It's that without structure, you can't tell the 10% of useful output from the 90% of noise