And what is using Confluence in the first place? Your MacBook Pro is faster than a supercomputer from 20 years ago. As we make compute cheaper, we find ways to use it that are less efficient in an absolute sense but more efficient for the end user. A graphical docs portal like Confluence is a hell of a lot easier to use than EMacs and SSH to edit plain text files on an 80 character terminal. But it uses thousands of times more compute.

It seems ridiculous right now because we don’t have hardware to accelerate the LLMs, but in 5 years this will be trivial to run.

I'm confused by your analogy. A wiki run server is extremely efficient to run, and can be hosted from a tiny little raspberry pie. A search engine can be optimized to provide results near O(1). You can even pull up and read results on a very old computer. All of the concerns around cost and resource efficiency can be addressed as all of this is a solved problem.

Even with an LLM agent getting cheaper to run in the future, it's still fundamentally non-deterministic so the ongoing cost for a single exploration query run can never get anywhere near as cheap as running a wiki with a proper search engine.