"what is it" file and directory analysis via MCP and local LLM, for console and KDE by rsimai

Description

Users sometimes wonder what files or directories they find on their local PC are good for. If they can't determine from the filename or metadata, there should an easy way to quickly analyze the content and at least guess the meaning. An LLM could help with that, through the use of a filesystem MCP and to-text-converters for typical file types. Ideally this is integrated into the desktop environment but works as well from a console. All data is processed locally or "on premise", no artifacts remain or leave the system.

Goals

• The user can run a command from the console, to check on a file or directory
• The filemanager contains the "analyze" feature within the context menu
• The local LLM could serve for other use cases where privacy matters

TBD

• Find or write capable one-shot and interactive MCP client
• Find or write simple+secure file access MCP server
• Create local LLM service with appropriate footprint, containerized
• Shell command with options
• KDE integration (Dolphin)
• Package
• Document

Resources

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Background Coding Agent by mmanno

Description

I had only bad experiences with AI one-shots. However, monitoring agent work closely and interfering often did result in productivity gains.

Now, other companies are using agents in pipelines. That makes sense to me, just like CI, we want to offload work to pipelines: Our engineering teams are consistently slowed down by "toil": low-impact, repetitive maintenance tasks. A simple linter rule change, a dependency bump, rebasing patch-sets on top of newer releases or API deprecation requires dozens of manual PRs, draining time from feature development.

So far we have been writing deterministic, script-based automation for these tasks. And it turns out to be a common trap. These scripts are brittle, complex, and become a massive maintenance burden themselves.

Can we make prompts and workflows smart enough to succeed at background coding?

Goals

We will build a platform that allows engineers to execute complex code transformations using prompts.

By automating this toil, we accelerate large-scale migrations and allow teams to focus on high-value work.

Our platform will consist of three main components:

• "Change" Definition: Engineers will define a transformation as a simple, declarative manifest:
  
  • The target repositories.
    
  • A wrapper to run a "coding agent", e.g., "gemini-cli".
    
  • The task as a natural language prompt.
    
• "Change" Management Service: A central service that orchestrates the jobs. It will receive Change definitions and be responsible for the job lifecycle.
  
• Execution Runners: We could use existing sandboxed CI runners (like GitHub/GitLab runners) to execute each job or spawn a container.

MVP

• Define the Change manifest format.
  
• Build the core Management Service that can accept and queue a Change.
• Connect management service and runners, dynamically dispatch jobs to runners.
• Create a basic runner script that can run a hard-coded prompt against a test repo and open a PR.
  

Stretch Goals:

• Multi-layered approach, Workflow Agents trigger Coding Agents:
  
  1. Workflow Agent: Gather information about the task interactively from the user.
     
  2. Coding Agent: Once the interactive agent has refined the task into a clear prompt, it hands this prompt off to the "coding agent." This background agent is responsible for executing the task and producing the actual pull request.
     
• Use MCP:
  
  1. Workflow Agent gathers context information from Slack, Github, etc.
     
  2. Workflow Agent triggers a Coding Agent.
     
• Create a "Standard Task" library with reliable prompts.
  1. Rebasing rancher-monitoring to a new version of kube-prom-stack
     
  2. Update charts to use new images
     
  3. Apply changes to comply with a new linter
     
  4. Bump complex Go dependencies, like k8s modules
     
  5. Backport pull requests to other branches
• Add “review agents” that review the generated PR.
  

See also

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Liz - Prompt autocomplete by ftorchia

Description

Liz is the Rancher AI assistant for cluster operations.

Goals

We want to help users when sending new messages to Liz, by adding an autocomplete feature to complete their requests based on the context.

Example:

• User prompt: "Can you show me the list of p"
• Autocomplete suggestion: "Can you show me the list of p...od in local cluster?"

Example:

• User prompt: "Show me the logs of #rancher-"
• Chat console: It shows a drop-down widget, next to the # character, with the list of available pod names starting with "rancher-".

Technical Overview

1. The AI agent should expose a new ws/autocomplete endpoint to proxy autocomplete messages to the LLM.
2. The UI extension should be able to display prompt suggestions and allow users to apply the autocomplete to the Prompt via keyboard shortcuts.

Resources

GitHub repository

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Local AI assistant with optional integrations and mobile companion by livdywan

Description

Setup a local AI assistant for research, brainstorming and proof reading. Look into SurfSense, Open WebUI and possibly alternatives. Explore integration with services like openQA. There should be no cloud dependencies. Mobile phone support or an additional companion app would be a bonus. The goal is not to develop everything from scratch.

User Story

• Allison Average wants a one-click local AI assistent on their openSUSE laptop.
• Ash Awesome wants AI on their phone without an expensive subscription.

Goals

• Evaluate a local SurfSense setup for day to day productivity
• Test opencode for vibe coding and tool calling

Timeline

Day 1

• Took a look at SurfSense and started setting up a local instance.
• Unfortunately the container setup did not work well. Tho this was a great opportunity to learn some new podman commands and refresh my memory on how to recover a corrupted btrfs filesystem.

Day 2

• Due to its sheer size and complexity SurfSense seems to have triggered btrfs fragmentation. Naturally this was not visible in any podman-related errors or in the journal. So this took up much of my second day.

Day 3

• Trying out opencode with Qwen3-Coder and Qwen2.5-Coder.

Day 4

• Context size is a thing, and models are not equally usable for vibe coding.
• Through arduous browsing for ollama models I did find some like myaniu/qwen2.5-1m:7b with 1m but even then it is not obvious if they are meant for tool calls.

Day 5

• Whilst trying to make opencode usable I discovered ramalama which worked instantly and very well.

Outcomes

surfsense

I could not easily set this up completely. Maybe in part due to my filesystem issues. Was expecting this to be less of an effort.

opencode

Installing opencode and ollama in my distrobox container along with the following configs worked for me.

When preparing a new project from scratch it is a good idea to start out with a template.

opencode.json

``` {

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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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