I tend to agree: I don’t understand what the “one-off app” is trying to achieve. In the example of the rental apartment—the user specified the parameters in the query. Just apply them, right?

I offer this in the spirit of feeling like I’m missing something, not out of negativity—I just genuinely don't understand the proposition.

What’s the advantage of trying to extract and normalize features from already-messy data sources, then provide controls that duplicate the query, rather than just applying the query and returning the results? Isn’t the user turning to a natural-language LLM specifically to avoid operating idiosyncratic UI controls?

For that matter, it takes time to learn to use an interface effectively. To understand how what it says it’s doing connects to what it’s actually doing. I know I can always trust McMaster Carr’s filter controls, and I know I can never trust Amazon’s wacky random ones.

It seems to me that it’s much harder to pick the right controls and make them work correctly than it is to throw some controls in an interface. Maybe that’s what I’m missing: that just wiring in controls in the first place is the hard part for most people who don’t work in this space.

Is the idea here that I’d need to learn a brand new interface, and figure out whether I can trust it, with every query?