[skydhash]

They are. But engineering is about minimizing costs in solving a problem while ensuring requirements are met. Not worrying about costs is not engineering. It's either a research project (where you want to know if something is possible) or playing around.

[imagent]

The cost of prototyping has dropped so much due to LLMs and coding agents that it basically always makes sense to prototype something to elicit feedback, just as part of the requirements gathering process. E.g. if you can spend $50 to understand something that will save you two weeks of effort, wouldn't you do that? That's the sort of dynamic I'm talking about.

[skydhash]

The cost of prototyping has always been very low. I can quickly sketch a UX flow using balsamiq. Or copy-paste paste code from docs and examples to show a rough working model with. If you can extract the essence of the problem you can quickly realize cheap ways to demonstrate a solution, and not spend two weeks trying to code it.

If there’s something that is wrong with using LLMs to prototype, it is that those prototypes are always too complex. Instead of decomposing a problem and testing unrelated concerns apart from each other, it’s often a mix of everything that the LLM user had been thinking about.

Often there’s no rapid iteration where you are comparing several approaches. Instead it became tunnel vision and confirmation bias where if it’s working, that means it’s the solution.