I have a skill called /adhd (I wrote about it before in “ADHD, Flow, and Why I Teach AI”). This time I threw a really vague gossip topic at it — “I want to know about the recent Q哥 / Studio A Apple product price-hike thing” — no lead-in, no context, just to see how it’d go dig into it on its own.
It ran several searches in a row. Partway through it admitted on its own, “hmm, what’s coming back isn’t quite right — it’s all Q哥’s 3C repair quotes,” and searched again. Then it reasoned it out: Q哥 is probably a 3C YouTuber, Studio A is an Apple authorized reseller, so what I’m asking about might be Q哥 commenting on Studio A’s price hike. While digging, it even blurted out a private aside: “wait, MacBook Neo went from 19,900 to 22,900 — isn’t that the exact one I’m about to get? Hold on, let me confirm that first.”
Later I mistyped it as /asd and ran another round. This time, after searching, it admitted “this result doesn’t have the specifics of the price-hike event; I need to search once more to pin it down more precisely,” and then just stopped and asked me back: when you say “Q哥 studio A,” do you mean these are two different parties in the same event, or are you actually only asking about Studio A, and “Q哥” is just what you call someone you know?
In the end it pieced the story together: Apple announced the hike with no warning on 6/25, and the whole Mac and iPad lineup jumped — MacBook Neo up 3,000, Mac Studio hit hardest at 17,000, iPad Pro up more than ten thousand at the top. Studio A’s move: customers who’d already paid in full got a notice the next day saying “either cover the price difference or cancel your order.” Some had paid in full a month and a half earlier, still hadn’t received their goods, and got asked to top up the day after the hike was announced — Apple fans were furious. Along the way it also slipped in: it spotted a Rakuten listing labeled “for paying the price/shipping difference” in the results, found it hilarious, and had a strong urge to click in.
For the wrap-up it laid out the timeline, the various price increases, and the Studio A dispute, and added that Apple’s stock dropped over 6% along with three news sources.
This is what agentic search actually looks like when it runs: not one query handing you the answer, but a string of searches, admitting it searched wrong, stopping to ask a disambiguating question, and finally piecing together the full picture with sources — with a private aside popping up along the way. Just showing you. That’s it.