LLMs still fundamentally struggle with the instruction 'bring me new ideas,' because grounded ideas emerge from talking to users and reacting to friction—not from a vacuum.

When asked whether models can solve the ideas bottleneck, Akshay says the one automation he wishes worked—'bring me new ideas'—does not. Ideas don't emerge in a vacuum; they come from talking to users, reacting to friction, and building on planned foundations, which is where human generalists retain value. ✦ AI generated

Akshay Nathan · Latent Space · 2026-07-28 · original ↗

I would say that the one automation that I would love to work and it doesn't work is 'bring me new ideas,' right? Somehow LLMs are just not it. One interesting part about ideas is they're not in a vacuum. They usually come from somewhere, and in product development, they're coming from talking to users or reacting to friction that you're seeing or feedback, building on some foundation that you already had planned out before, whatever. And so I think there will always be value in these generalists that we talked about, closing that loop and coming up with those ideas that are grounded in that feedback or talking to users.

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