> It’s great at bread and butter stuff, but not at specialised ideation.

This is fundamentally different from your earlier, stronger claim that - "The very best LLM can answer is the answer you can expect from an online forum like Reddit or a book/paper published more than a year ago."

I use a less popular java framework quite a lot, Micronaut (I want to move away from it, but that's a different discussion).

When trying to solve problems with its behaviour, I can watch as Claude digests the framework source to come up with suggestions, identify bugs that are causing behaviour regressions, and generally unlock stuff that I've previously found very frustrating. Frustrating because the documentation covers a tiny amount of what's in there, and frustrating because there's little online discourse about any of it to refer to.

Is this earth shattering in itself? Probably not. But it's certainly better than you can find from "an online forum like Reddit or a book/paper published more than a year ago".

It's also far easier to find information through LLMs for another niche I play in, certificate authorities, than it is on the open web. Try to look up anything to do with certificates and you'll just get guided to endless "Why my certificate not work? Browser says no?" discussions, because actually creating certificate authorites is again very niche , not widely discussed and a lot of what you need to leverage in any given language isn't well documented because "you'll never need to do this". Well actually...