True. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I haven’t actually implemented this yet, but I’ve been thinking about making a local file search program using an LLM. It would enable me to search for things in ways that are absolutely impossible with language-naive tools.
Here are a few examples of tasks I have in the past wanted to do, but was not able to:
Find references to the board game ‘go’ but please for the love of god do not return every case of the verb ‘go’. Also include passages that refer to the game but don’t mention it by name.
Find all references to foods, eating, or meals.
Find all the dialog lines of a specific character.
You can’t do any of that with simple search, or even with regular expressions. You need general language awareness.
I know that LLMs will not be perfect at these tasks, either (at least not the current ones), but I think they could be quite effective.