Honeycomb shares candid insights from building Query Assistant, their natural language to query interface, revealing the complex reality behind LLM-powered product development. Key challenges included managing context window limitations with large schemas, dealing with LLM latency (2-15+ seconds per query), navigating prompt engineering without established best practices, balancing correctness with usefulness, addressing prompt injection vulnerabilities, and handling legal/compliance requirements. The article emphasizes that successful LLM implementation requires treating models as feature engines rather than standalone products, and argues that early access programs often fail to reveal real-world implementation challenges.
