Have you actually used a frontier LLM for this usecase? It’s quite different from a search engine.
In the case where someone asked your exact precise question including follow-ups, you get the same (or better) results from search.
In most cases for a small project, no one has answered your precise question, so you might need to read docs and figure it out. It’s often much quicker to use an LLM here (though sometimes less accurate than the hypothetical matching search result).
As a benchmark, try using an LLM vs. search for answering questions about Nix. I find it to be 10-100x more efficient than searching and reading through the docs (including hallucinations and time spent corroborating, since usually I can validate the answer by running some command). This is perhaps a cherry-pick for LLMs, but it should illustrate clearly why “just use search” is missing the value prop completely.
In the case where someone asked your exact precise question including follow-ups, you get the same (or better) results from search.
In most cases for a small project, no one has answered your precise question, so you might need to read docs and figure it out. It’s often much quicker to use an LLM here (though sometimes less accurate than the hypothetical matching search result).
As a benchmark, try using an LLM vs. search for answering questions about Nix. I find it to be 10-100x more efficient than searching and reading through the docs (including hallucinations and time spent corroborating, since usually I can validate the answer by running some command). This is perhaps a cherry-pick for LLMs, but it should illustrate clearly why “just use search” is missing the value prop completely.