I think for mostly search-focused use case like the one presented here AI is great as you don't ask it to build stuff or invent new drugs, you just want to retrieve relevant documents with laser precision, and agents can do that.

I think right now I'm mostly disappointed with agents writing code as they always degrade the quality of the codebase after a while, and the same goes for writing in general which just requires a ton of editing and mostly just sounds good but doesn't have a lot of substance in the end. I think you can really tell that these systems are trained to just produce plausible streams of text, especially in longer artefacts you notice that locally the inner consistency of what they produce is great but globally it really falls apart, it's like seeing the limits of their "intelligence".

For search however I really like AI, it has improved information retrieval so much for me where before I had to think about which keywords to use and combine and which filters to apply, describing what I'm looking for in plain text and then having the AI find it for me feels magical. Recently I wanted to find an artist that I heard in some old episode of the KEXP runcast (a running podcast), and I didn't remember anything except that it was rap with a kind of monotone voice a fast beat and a strong accent. Googles' agent asked a few clarifying questions and after a few rounds it found the artist for me, Genesis Uwusu. That's why I think Google will win in the AI assisted search market, they just have the best integration between fast and reasonably "smart" agents and high quality search data. Claude or ChatGPT are too slow and don't have fast enough data retrieval it seems, using them for search feels quite sluggish in comparison.