Comment by IanCal

It's also dramatically easier to have a discussion around what does or doesn't work with a concrete example. "This but with X" or "This but without Y".

I've found this also helps just internally - start with a prototype and you have engineering discussions that are more practical than theoretical.

> ..and this was maybe 1/3 of the effort I was planning for.

Quick anecdote. When just starting out I was building a tool to automatically find the composition of essential oils used given a GC/MS output, and was told it needed to be "fast". I spent a long time optimising it, working on parallelising it and more. I spoke to them after getting it down to maybe 15 seconds or a couple of minutes something like that and was getting ready to explain why I couldn't make it fast.

"So you said you need this to be fast to be worthwhile, but"

"[intejects] yeah being fast is important, if it takes more than a day or two it'll be a lot harder to use"

...

Well it was a useful lesson at least.