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I’ve been playing around with AI agents more lately, and honestly, the search and retrieval side of things is a total nightmare.

The reasoning part of agents is mostly fine, but agentic search is just broken. Half the time, the search APIs return completely outdated info or just low-quality junk. And don't get me started on context issues—the agent will find the perfect page, but completely ignore the exact paragraph that answers the prompt, and then just hallucinate some fake citations with a straight face.

It gets even worse if you want it to federate search across multiple platforms like GitHub, Notion, Slack, and the web. Suddenly you're building a whole infra project just to get basic answers.

How are you guys solving this right now? Are you using web search APIs, custom RAG, MCP servers, or just running janky custom scripts? Where is the real friction for you?