The tension I’m trying to understand is that in a lot of real setups the “corpus” isn’t voluntarily curated — it’s fragmented across machines/networks/tools, and the opportunity cost of “move everything into one place” is exactly why people fall back to grep and ad-hoc search.
Do you think the right answer is always “accept the constraint and curate harder”, or is there a middle ground where you can keep sources where they are but still get reliable re-entry (even if it’s incomplete/partial)?
I’m collecting constraints like this as the core design input (more context in my HN profile/bio if you want to compare notes).