> it sounds like there were already precedents or existing pieces of knowledge, but humans had not thought to connect them

A lot of math research is like that. And, like the blog post suggests, problems one gives PhD students are 95% like that.

Basically medical science too. My wife was able to diagnose her own anemia that the doctors kept missing, and has since been able to have iron infusions.

The human doctors kept ignoring the signals, kept putting it down to 'diet' and 'exercise' (even though she does plenty of both)

> there were already precedents or existing pieces of knowledge, but humans had not thought to connect them

We used to call that "low hanging fruit."