The difficulty with this is that §174 counts "all such costs incident to the development or improvement of a product." This makes it hard for you to reclassify the researcher role as any kind of software development role because software development is still R&D. The fact that it includes payments to third parties for R&D also means you can't even just split your software dev house into a nonprofit or something. What can you do? Claim prompting an LLM is not software development even if it produces code? It's just search then, right?