The Agentic Rancher Experiment: Do Androids Dream of Electric Cattle? by moio

Rancher is a beast of a codebase. Let's investigate if the new 2025 generation of GitHub Autonomous Coding Agents and Copilot Workspaces can actually tame it.

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The Plan

Create a sandbox GitHub Organization, clone in key Rancher repositories, and let the AI loose to see if it can handle real-world enterprise OSS maintenance - or if it just hallucinates new breeds of Kubernetes resources!

Specifically, throw "Agentic Coders" some typical tasks in a complex, long-lived open-source project, such as:

❥ The Grunt Work: generate missing GoDocs, unit tests, and refactorings. Rebase PRs.

❥ The Complex Stuff: fix actual (historical) bugs and feature requests to see if they can traverse the complexity without (too much) human hand-holding.

❥ Hunting Down Gaps: find areas lacking in docs, areas of improvement in code, dependency bumps, and so on.

If time allows, also experiment with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give agents context on our specific build pipelines and CI/CD logs.

Why?

We know AI can write "Hello World." and also moderately complex programs from a green field. But can it rebase a 3-month-old PR with conflicts in rancher/rancher? I want to find the breaking point of current AI agents to determine if and how they can help us to reduce our technical debt, work faster and better. At the same time, find out about pitfalls and shortcomings.

The CONCLUSION!!!

A State of the Union document was compiled to summarize lessons learned this week. For more gory details, just read on the diary below!

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Uyuni Health-check Grafana AI Troubleshooter by ygutierrez

Description

This project explores the feasibility of using the open-source Grafana LLM plugin to enhance the Uyuni Health-check tool with LLM capabilities. The idea is to integrate a chat-based "AI Troubleshooter" directly into existing dashboards, allowing users to ask natural-language questions about errors, anomalies, or performance issues.

Goals

• Investigate if and how the grafana-llm-app plug-in can be used within the Uyuni Health-check tool.
• Investigate if this plug-in can be used to query LLMs for troubleshooting scenarios.
• Evaluate support for local LLMs and external APIs through the plugin.
• Evaluate if and how the Uyuni MCP server could be integrated as another source of information.

Resources

Grafana LMM plug-in

Uyuni Health-check

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Multi-agent AI assistant for Linux troubleshooting by doreilly

Description

Explore multi-agent architecture as a way to avoid MCP context rot.

Having one agent with many tools bloats the context with low-level details about tool descriptions, parameter schemas etc which hurts LLM performance. Instead have many specialised agents, each with just the tools it needs for its role. A top level supervisor agent takes the user prompt and delegates to appropriate sub-agents.

Goals

Create an AI assistant with some sub-agents that are specialists at troubleshooting Linux subsystems, e.g. systemd, selinux, firewalld etc. The agents can get information from the system by implementing their own tools with simple function calls, or use tools from MCP servers, e.g. a systemd-agent can use tools from systemd-mcp.

Example prompts/responses:

user$ the system seems slow
assistant$ process foo with pid 12345 is using 1000% cpu ...

user$ I can't connect to the apache webserver
assistant$ the firewall is blocking http ... you can open the port with firewall-cmd --add-port ...

Resources

Language Python. The Python ADK is more mature than Golang.

https://google.github.io/adk-docs/

https://github.com/djoreilly/linux-helper

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Docs Navigator MCP: SUSE Edition by mackenzie.techdocs

Description

Docs Navigator MCP: SUSE Edition is an AI-powered documentation navigator that makes finding information across SUSE, Rancher, K3s, and RKE2 documentation effortless. Built as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, it enables semantic search, intelligent Q&A, and documentation summarization using 100% open-source AI models (no API keys required!). The project also allows you to bring your own keys from Anthropic and Open AI for parallel processing.

Goals

• [ X ] Build functional MCP server with documentation tools
• [ X ] Implement semantic search with vector embeddings
• [ X ] Create user-friendly web interface
• [ X ] Optimize indexing performance (parallel processing)
• [ X ] Add SUSE branding and polish UX
• [ X ] Stretch Goal: Add more documentation sources
• [ X ] Stretch Goal: Implement document change detection for auto-updates

Coming Soon!

• Community Feedback: Test with real users and gather improvement suggestions

Resources

• Repository: Docs Navigator MCP: SUSE Edition GitHub
• UI Demo: Live UI Demo of Docs Navigator MCP: SUSE Edition

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Extended private brain - RAG my own scripts and data into offline LLM AI by tjyrinki_suse

Description

For purely studying purposes, I'd like to find out if I could teach an LLM some of my own accumulated knowledge, to use it as a sort of extended brain.

I might use qwen3-coder or something similar as a starting point.

Everything would be done 100% offline without network available to the container, since I prefer to see when network is needed, and make it so it's never needed (other than initial downloads).

Goals

1. Learn something about RAG, LLM, AI.
2. Find out if everything works offline as intended.
3. As an end result have a new way to access my own existing know-how, but so that I can query the wisdom in them.
4. Be flexible to pivot in any direction, as long as there are new things learned.

Resources

To be found on the fly.

Timeline

Day 1 (of 4)

• Tried out a RAG demo, expanded on feeding it my own data
• Experimented with qwen3-coder to add a persistent chat functionality, and keeping vectors in a pickle file
• Optimizations to keep everything within context window
• Learn and add a bit of PyTest

Day 2

• More experimenting and more data
• Study ChromaDB
• Add a Web UI that works from another computer even though the container sees network is down

Day 3

• The above RAG is working well enough for demonstration purposes.
• Pivot to trying out OpenCode, configuring local Ollama qwen3-coder there, to analyze the RAG demo.
• Figured out how to configure Ollama template to be usable under OpenCode. OpenCode locally is super slow to just running qwen3-coder alone.

Day 4 (final day)

• Battle with OpenCode that was both slow and kept on piling up broken things.
• Call it success as after all the agentic AI was working locally.
• Clean up the mess left behind a bit.

Blog Post

Summarized the findings at blog post.

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Song Search with CLAP by gcolangiuli

Description

Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) is an open-source library that enables the training of a neural network on both Audio and Text descriptions, making it possible to search for Audio using a Text input. Several pre-trained models for song search are already available on huggingface

Goals

Evaluate how CLAP can be used for song searching and determine which types of queries yield the best results by developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in Python. Based on the results of this MVP, future steps could include:

• Music Tagging;
• Free text search;
• Integration with an LLM (for example, with MCP or the OpenAI API) for music suggestions based on your own library.

The code for this project will be entirely written using AI to better explore and demonstrate AI capabilities.

Result

In this MVP we implemented:

• Async Song Analysis with Clap model
• Free Text Search of the songs
• Similar song search based on vector representation
• Containerised version with web interface

We also documented what went well and what can be improved in the use of AI.

You can have a look at the result here:

• Result Presentation
• hw25-song-search Github repo

Future implementation can be related to performance improvement and stability of the analysis.

References

• CLAP: The main model being researched;
• huggingface: Pre-trained models for CLAP;
• Free Music Archive: Creative Commons songs that can be used for testing;

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SUSE Observability MCP server by drutigliano

Description

The idea is to implement the SUSE Observability Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server as a specialized, middle-tier API designed to translate the complex, high-cardinality observability data from StackState (topology, metrics, and events) into highly structured, contextually rich, and LLM-ready snippets.

This MCP Server abstract the StackState APIs. Its primary function is to serve as a Tool/Function Calling target for AI agents. When an AI receives an alert or a user query (e.g., "What caused the outage?"), the AI calls an MCP Server endpoint. The server then fetches the relevant operational facts, summarizes them, normalizes technical identifiers (like URNs and raw metric names) into natural language concepts, and returns a concise JSON or YAML payload. This payload is then injected directly into the LLM's prompt, ensuring the final diagnosis or action is grounded in real-time, accurate SUSE Observability data, effectively minimizing hallucinations.

Goals

• Grounding AI Responses: Ensure that all AI diagnoses, root cause analyses, and action recommendations are strictly based on verifiable, real-time data retrieved from the SUSE Observability StackState platform.
• Simplifying Data Access: Abstract the complexity of StackState's native APIs (e.g., Time Travel, 4T Data Model) into simple, semantic functions that can be easily invoked by LLM tool-calling mechanisms.
• Data Normalization: Convert complex, technical identifiers (like component URNs, raw metric names, and proprietary health states) into standardized, natural language terms that an LLM can easily reason over.
• Enabling Automated Remediation: Define clear, action-oriented MCP endpoints (e.g., execute_runbook) that allow the AI agent to initiate automated operational workflows (e.g., restarts, scaling) after a diagnosis, closing the loop on observability.

 Hackweek STEP

• Create a functional MCP endpoint exposing one (or more) tool(s) to answer queries like "What is the health of service X?") by fetching, normalizing, and returning live StackState data in an LLM-ready format.

 Scope

• Implement read-only MCP server that can:
  • Connect to a live SUSE Observability instance and authenticate (with API token)
  • Use tools to fetch data for a specific component URN (e.g., current health state, metrics, possibly topology neighbors, ...).
  • Normalize response fields (e.g., URN to "Service Name," health state DEVIATING to "Unhealthy", raw metrics).
  • Return the data as a structured JSON payload compliant with the MCP specification.

Deliverables

• MCP Server v0.1 A running Golang MCP server with at least one tool.
• A README.md and a test script (e.g., curl commands or a simple notebook) showing how an AI agent would call the endpoint and the resulting JSON payload.

Outcome A functional and testable API endpoint that proves the core concept: translating complex StackState data into a simple, LLM-ready format. This provides the foundation for developing AI-driven diagnostics and automated remediation.

Resources

• https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/its-the-end-of-observability-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel-fine
• https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-remote-mcp-server
• https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/index
• https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/develop/build-server

 Basic implementation

• https://github.com/drutigliano19/suse-observability-mcp-server

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Results

Successfully developed and delivered a fully functional SUSE Observability MCP Server that bridges language models with SUSE Observability's operational data. This project demonstrates how AI agents can perform intelligent troubleshooting and root cause analysis using structured access to real-time infrastructure data.

Example execution

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AI-Powered Unit Test Automation for Agama by joseivanlopez

The Agama project is a multi-language Linux installer that leverages the distinct strengths of several key technologies:

• Rust: Used for the back-end services and the core HTTP API, providing performance and safety.
• TypeScript (React/PatternFly): Powers the modern web user interface (UI), ensuring a consistent and responsive user experience.
• Ruby: Integrates existing, robust YaST libraries (e.g., yast-storage-ng) to reuse established functionality.

The Problem: Testing Overhead

Developing and maintaining code across these three languages requires a significant, tedious effort in writing, reviewing, and updating unit tests for each component. This high cost of testing is a drain on developer resources and can slow down the project's evolution.

The Solution: AI-Driven Automation

This project aims to eliminate the manual overhead of unit testing by exploring and integrating AI-driven code generation tools. We will investigate how AI can:

1. Automatically generate new unit tests as code is developed.
2. Intelligently correct and update existing unit tests when the application code changes.

By automating this crucial but monotonous task, we can free developers to focus on feature implementation and significantly improve the speed and maintainability of the Agama codebase.

Goals

• Proof of Concept: Successfully integrate and demonstrate an authorized AI tool (e.g., gemini-cli) to automatically generate unit tests.
• Workflow Integration: Define and document a new unit test automation workflow that seamlessly integrates the selected AI tool into the existing Agama development pipeline.
• Knowledge Sharing: Establish a set of best practices for using AI in code generation, sharing the learned expertise with the broader team.

Contribution & Resources

We are seeking contributors interested in AI-powered development and improving developer efficiency. Whether you have previous experience with code generation tools or are eager to learn, your participation is highly valuable.

If you want to dive deep into AI for software quality, please reach out and join the effort!

• Authorized AI Tools: Tools supported by SUSE (e.g., gemini-cli)
• Focus Areas: Rust, TypeScript, and Ruby components within the Agama project.

Interesting Links

• goose

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