- on the one hand, time-to-market is super important. Getting to the right place faster is obviously better.

- on the other hand, figuring out right product/right fit is hard, and if a business spends that much cost every 3 days chasing every idea (most of which may be bad ideas), they’ve probably wasted a lot of money.

Obviously token costs are cheaper than developers, and local models would reduce costs still further. But the thought I keep coming to is: maybe there’s a benefit to slowing down and not jumping to implement?

I usually hear the opposite side (better to implement 10 things and throw out 9 of them, easier to react to prototypes, etc.). But I also think the infinity of possible ideas doesn’t get smaller when you throw more engineers or compute at it. You just end up exploring more, possibly bad ideas. This works out if exploring more of the space builds a greater understanding of the problem and increases the likelihood that one of your choices pans out. But the cost of exploring the space isn’t $0 and 0 time.

And it's certainly not the same price!

What products are you talking about? Because I see smaller teams or one man bands putting out low quality prototypes, but not teams of 10 delivering a years work in a sprint.