Know the edges of the tool

LLMs are brilliant pattern machines, not databases of truth. Building responsibly means designing around their failure modes.

Where they shine

• Drafting, summarizing, rewriting, translating.
• Extracting structure from messy text.
• Coding assistance and explanation.
• Conversational interfaces over your data (with RAG).

Where they fail

• Hallucination — confidently making things up.
• Stale knowledge (training cutoff).
• Weak at precise math and long multi-step logic without help.

Mitigations

Ground answers in your data (RAG), give tools for facts/math, ask for citations, and keep a human in the loop for high-stakes output.

Takeaway: design for "sometimes wrong" and you'll ship products people trust.