I think as a direct replacement for internet search, or even general knowledge queries, I definitely agree with you. When it does work though, it's hands-down a better experience. I imagine the 80/20 problem of making it work for the long tail of difficult queries that people will throw at it that will be the hard part. You can't just have a bot spewing out blatantly incorrect data without sourcing half the time. I think it's a coin flip whether those issues will be resolved anytime soon.

Where I do see it being handy is with mundane tasks or those "tip of my tongue" queries. I was doing some tedious mapping of enums to other enums today, and that's one of those problems where you can script it out in vim/sed, but then need to spend a while double checking it against the spec anyways. I'd love to ask a bot to do that for me. Similarly, the easy stuff like "how do I do [common git operation] again?", it seems to do great on, since there are canonical answers to that stuff.

I've been generally uninterested in the ChatGPT craze, but I did check out perplexity.ai when it popped up on HN a few days ago. It did seem genuinely useful for these types of queries, and it sources its answers with web links. I could see a space for that type of tool, as long as the hairier parts of the chatbot can be filtered away.