The Killer App Of Llms Isn't What You Think

I've been building ren.ph for months now. 60,000+ pages of Philippine real estate data, programmatic SEO, structured data, the works. Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT. I use all three daily. They help me write code, generate content, debug systems.

But that's not the most valuable thing they do for me.

The most valuable thing is thinking.

Not "generate a strategy document." Not "summarize this article." I mean actually thinking through problems, out loud, in a chat window, with an AI that has enough context about my business to push back on bad ideas and build on good ones.

At some point I realized something uncomfortable: Claude probably knows more about my business strategy than my accountant, my lawyer, or any single business partner. Not because I set out to share all that. It just happened, naturally, over dozens of conversations. Every decision I talked through, every problem I worked out loud. It accumulated.

Then I started asking people around me. Business owners. Developers. Marketers. People who use LLMs regularly.

Same answer. Every time.

They're all doing it. Thinking out loud with AI. Working through decisions. Exploring ideas they wouldn't bounce off a colleague because it's too early, too half-baked, or too revealing.

I'm starting to think this might be the most widely used application of LLMs, and nobody's naming it.

Why It Works

Every human relationship has friction attached to honesty. You filter what you say to a business partner because there's a power dynamic. You hold back with your team because you don't want to show uncertainty. You don't call your lawyer to brainstorm at 2am because that's a billable call.

With an LLM, all of that disappears.

No judgment. No competition. No gossip. No leverage. No billable hours.

You can say "here's a half-formed idea that might be stupid" and get a thoughtful response without any social cost.

That's not a feature anyone designed. It's an emergent behavior that happened because the friction dropped to zero and the utility was immediate.

The Part Nobody's Talking About

Here's what I think is actually happening at scale: millions of people are now having their most honest, unfiltered thinking conversations with an AI. The stuff they'd normally process alone in their head, or not process at all, is now being externalized into a chat window.

That's powerful. Some of my best strategic decisions for Ren.ph came from thinking out loud with LLMs. Not because the AI gave me the answer, but because the act of explaining my reasoning to something that asks good follow-up questions forced me to sharpen my own thinking.

But it also means something else.

You're sharing more than you realize. Not in one dramatic disclosure, but in the accumulation of hundreds of small conversations. Your business model, your insecurities about it, your competitive concerns, your financial targets, your half-baked ideas, your real opinions about partners and clients. It all adds up.

I'm not saying stop. I'm saying be conscious of it.

What I've Settled On

I still use LLMs as thinking partners. Daily. It's too valuable not to. But I've started being more intentional about it:

I know what I'm sharing and I'm okay with it. I don't give access to everything just because I can (email, file systems, etc.). I treat the convenience as a tradeoff, not a freebie.

The era of AI as a productivity tool is what gets all the headlines. But the quieter, more significant shift might be this: AI as the first thinking partner with zero social cost.

Everyone I've asked is already doing it. You probably are too.

Aaron Zara is a builder and operator based in the Philippines. Founder of GodMode.ph and builder of Ren.ph, a 60,000-page verified Philippine real estate platform built and operated by one engineer.