One of my favourite things to do when using an LLM is to ask it for problems similar to the one I’m solving.

This heuristic is one of Claude Shannon’s tips in Creative Thinking: reasoning by analogy.

A very similar device is seeking similar known problems. I think I could illustrate this schematically in this way.

You have a problem P here and there is a solution S which you do not know yet perhaps over here. If you have experience in the field represented, that you are working in, you may perhaps know of a somewhat similar problem, call it P’, which has already been solved and which has a solution, S’, all you need to do – all you may have to do is find the analogy from P’ here to P and the same analogy from S’ to S in order to get back to the solution of the given problem.

— Claude Shannon, Creative Thinking (1952).

In Shannon’s time, the mental matrix of known problems was only as big as your career — the set you had encountered or studied. Today, that’s a small collection compared with what an LLM has seen.

That’s what makes this heuristic a multiplier. You solve your current problem faster, and you come away knowing about a few others you’d never have run into.