I can somewhat relate to this in the sense that LLMs help me explore different paths of my thought process. The only way to do this earlier was to actually sit down and write it all out and carefully look for gaps. But now the fast feedback loop of LLMs speeds up this process. At times it even shows some path which I hadn't thought of. Or it firms up a direction which I thought only had vague connection.

To take one concrete example, it helped me get a well rounded picture of how British despite having such low footprint in India (at their peak there were about 150K of them) were able to colonise it with 300+ million population.