But with these tools, we have the freedom to revisit old assumptions. One of those is smart filtering. I can't tell you how many people tell me that they enjoy that as a good default.
Tools should make the fact that they do smart filtering very clear, because it can be surprising if you aren't expecting it. But otherwise, I'm not particularly sympathetic to your reasoning here because: 1) what I said above about standard tools being available and 2) these tools should have ways of disabling smart filtering. So if it bites you, it should bite you only once. After that, you either learn to like it, learn to setup an alias and forget about it, or ragequit the tool.
ag bug: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/1233