[Terr_]

Tangentially, earlier talk a "text-box interface" made me think of Blender's "type the name of the immediate action you know should be possible but can't quickly find in hierarchical menus" box--a feature also present in some IDEs--and I'd like to emphasize that those things are (A) totally different than all this AI stuff and (B) generally awesome.

[TeMPOraL]

Agreed. Unlike the AI stuff with its "empty textbox" problem, fast incremental search is capital-A Awesome! Pretty much my favorite UI paradigm ever, at least out of those that gained adoption after I started using computers.

The best incremental search UIs are those that respond near-instantly, and have a stable list of candidates that is (or at least feels like) being filtered, and not like every keystroke re-runs some search from scratch. Prime example, which made me love this UI paradigm, is Foobar2000 - even back in early 2000s, I could have hundreds or thousands of entries in the music library, and then I would type into the magic textbox and watch that huge list (or tree) get instantly trimmed with each keystroke.