"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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Update M2Crypto by mcepl

There are couple of projects I work on, which need my attention and putting them to shape:

• M2Crypto

Goal for this Hackweek

• Put M2Crypto into better shape (most issues closed, all pull requests processed)
• More fun to learn jujutsu
• Play more with Gemini, how much it help (or not).
• Perhaps, also (just slightly related), help to fix vis to work with LuaJIT, particularly to make vis-lspc working.

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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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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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GenAI-Powered Systemic Bug Evaluation and Management Assistant by rtsvetkov

Motivation

What is the decision critical question which one can ask on a bug? How this question affects the decision on a bug and why?

Let's make GenAI look on the bug from the systemic point and evaluate what we don't know. Which piece of information is missing to take a decision?

Description

To build a tool that takes a raw bug report (including error messages and context) and uses a large language model (LLM) to generate a series of structured, Socratic-style or Systemic questions designed to guide a the integration and development toward the root cause, rather than just providing a direct, potentially incorrect fix.

Goals

Set up a Python environment

Set the environment and get a Gemini API key. 2. Collect 5-10 realistic bug reports (from open-source projects, personal projects, or public forums like Stack Overflow—include the error message and the initial context).

Build the Dialogue Loop

1. Write a basic Python script using the Gemini API.
2. Implement a simple conversational loop: User Input (Bug) -> AI Output (Question) -> User Input (Answer to AI's question) -> AI Output (Next Question). Code Implementation

Socratic/Systemic Strategy Implementation

1. Refine the logic to ensure the questions follow a Socratic and Systemic path (e.g., from symptom-> context -> assumptions -> -> critical parts -> ).
2. Implement Function Calling (an advanced feature of the Gemini API) to suggest specific actions to the user, like "Run a ping test" or "Check the database logs."
3. Implement Bugzillla call to collect the
4. Implement Questioning Framework as LLVM pre-conditioning
5. Define set of instructions
6. Assemble the Tool

Resources

What are Systemic Questions?

Systemic questions explore the relationships, patterns, and interactions within a system rather than focusing on isolated elements.
In IT, they help uncover hidden dependencies, feedback loops, assumptions, and side-effects during debugging or architecture analysis.

Gitlab Project

gitlab.suse.de/sle-prjmgr/BugDecisionCritical_Question

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