I'm generally skeptical of the hype around LLMs, but I've been manually working around this broken mapping for years. I don't think I could have found a solution easily just by googling.
May I ask why you don't use asterisk? That searches for the current word.
I'm using :Rg in the mapping, which calls ripgrep via fzf.vim, so it searches across all files in a project and gives me a preview of all the results.
LLMs work pretty well for narrowly-scoped questions like this.
LLMs are also really good at generating regex based on a short description. It's saved me a bunch of time, since I don't use regex often enough to become proficient at it, but it's necessary for certain particular things (such as find/replace with Notepad++, or hyper-specific URIs in Bitwarden)
@brianpeiris isn't this what the * map does? I may not understand the difference.
I'm using :Rg here, which calls ripgrep to perform a search across all files in a directory. So it's not just a search within a single buffer.