alt Hacker NewsAI has become the new RegEx, being used where a string search would have done fine.
I won’t go into too much details (it’s a product I have to evaluate at work so it’s not really my story to tell) but vendor x has put OpenAI in to search metadata when really all I want is a keyword search… maybe with some fancy operators “blue” and DateTime > “2026-09-27 14:00”
Not “the blue thing yesterday” which also allows me to search for words that are slanderous that the AI hallucinates results for.
A search through metadata without AI is fine.
But an AI that can turn “the blue thing yesterday” into that metadata search is a really useful thing for many users. Unfortunately a lot of those same users aren’t going to need or want to see the metadata query, so product designers might obscure it behind an opaque tool call.