Re: [RFC] b4 dig: Add AI-powered email relationship discovery command

["Andrew Dona-Couch" <andrew@donacou.ch>]

What a remarkable discussion!  The arguments being made lay bare an important difference in perspective.

> you're still choosing to attack because it's LLM based and you have something
> personal against that.

This argument seems an utter abrogation of an engineer's core responsibility to understand the tools they use.  The concerns raised against LLMs here were specific and technical, were they not?

> I don't want to go too far down the "wasting resources path," because,
> honestly, a kid playing videogames for a weekend will waste more power than a
> maintainer submitting a couple of threads for analysis.

Quite disingenuous to treat the marginal cost of a single search as if it accounted for the true cost to society of making the product available.

I appreciate the careful consideration of maintainers here who work to keep the focus of development on real humans and a thoughtful and deliberative processes.

Thanks,
Andrew




-- 
We all do better when we all do better.  -Paul Wellstone

On Wed, Sep 10, 2025, at 09:38, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 09, 2025 at 08:22:58PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 09, 2025 at 12:32:14PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
>> > Add a new 'b4 dig' subcommand that uses AI agents to discover related
>> > emails for a given message ID. This helps developers find all relevant
>> > context around patches including previous versions, bug reports, reviews,
>> > and related discussions.
>> 
>> That really sounds like "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks
>> like a nail". The community has been working for multiple years to
>> improve discovery of relationships between patches and commits, with
>> great tools such are lore, lei and b4, and usage of commit IDs, patch
>> IDs and message IDs to link everything together. Those provide exact
>> results in a deterministic way, and consume a fraction of power of what
>> this patch would do. It would be very sad if this would be the direction
>> we decide to take.
>
> I don't want to go too far down the "wasting resources path," because,
> honestly, a kid playing videogames for a weekend will waste more power than a
> maintainer submitting a couple of threads for analysis.
>
> I've already worked on plugging in LLMs into summarization, so I'm not alien
> or opposed to this approach. I'd like to make this available to maintainers
> who find it useful, and completely out of the way for those maintainers who
> hate the whole idea. :)
>
> Best wishes,
> -K