Comment by catoc
6 days ago
“How about starting with reliably, deterministically, and instantly (say <50ms) finding obvious things like <…> searching by a prefix of their name? As a second criterion, I would like to find files by substrings of their name”
Even I can, and have, build search functionality like this. Deterministically. No LLMs or “AI” needed. In fact for satisfying the above criteria this kind of implementation is still far more reliable.
I've also written search code like this. It's trivial, at least at the scale of installed apps and such on a single computer.
AI makes it strictly worse. I do not want intelligence. I want to type, for example, "saf" and have Safari appear immediately, in the same place, every time, without popping into a different place as I'm trying to click it because a slower search process decided to displace the result. No "temperature", no randomness, no fancy crap.
Quicksilver worked great back in the day before Spotlight was ever even a thought.