TL;DR: I spent 9 months building LLM-powered apps to help cancer patients navigate clinical care—chatbots with EHR integrations, appointment prep tools, and iOS apps (that Apple kept rejecting). I found real use cases and built working prototypes, but I’m pivoting because LLMs aren’t ready for safe clinical use by patients. The core structural issues—context building, grounding, and usefulness—won’t be solved by the next model release. This is my personal experience; LLMs remain amazing for other use cases like prototyping the very applications illustrated in this post.

I have been writing for most of my life. I recently realized that most of my professional writings are owned by and hidden behind the corporations where I have worked at through my career. And as for my personal writings, they have become buried in numerous social media accounts and mostly inaccessible given the sheer volume of noise in these systems.

While this is not my first attempt at blogging – I used to write blogs since the early 2000s – it is my most conscious attempt to date.