LLMs as Universal Protocol Translators: The Middleware Pattern Nobody Planned For
Every integration engineer has stared at two systems that refuse to talk to each other. One speaks SOAP XML from 2008. The other expects a REST JSON payload designed last quarter. The traditional fix — write a custom parser, maintain a mapping layer, pray nobody changes the schema — works until the third or fourth system enters the picture. Then you're maintaining a combinatorial explosion of translation code that nobody wants to own.
Teams are now dropping an LLM into that gap. Not as a chatbot, not as a code generator, but as a runtime protocol translator that reads one format and writes another. It works disturbingly well for certain use cases — and fails in ways that are genuinely dangerous for others. Understanding the boundary between those two zones is the entire game.
