I'm tired of building complex filter UIs just for users to ignore them, type "shirt" into the search bar, get 400 results, and instantly bounce. our backend retrieval is actually really fast, but the human query formulation is awful.

Instead of writing 500 lines of custom debounced react filters to try and force them into categories, I'm looking at intercepting the keystrokes with an intent layer on the frontend. basically an ai-autocomplete that formats their vague text into a structured JSON payload before it ever hits the API.

Has anyone used frontend intent layers to fix vague search? looking at commandbar vs just dropping in a lighter ai-autocomplete hook.