Explore AI assistent to help with P4lang specific issues

[fruffy]

GPT assistants such as Devin or Leon are getting pretty popular these days.

Maybe we can set these GPT assistants up in such a way that they can help us with development and low-hanging technical fruits? If we get this right we could solve a bunch of smaller tasks (for example migrating or adding build systems, setting up CI properly, fixing problems for different kinds of operating systems, etc.)

[Vineet1101]

Hey @fruffy I was thinking maybe we could add github bot using github actions for this task. The bot will handle the small tasks like adding labels, replying to FAQs and also the ci/cd troubleshooting integrations. Also this can be a gsoc idea as well. what do you say

[Vineet1101]

@jafingerhut what are your thoughts on this idea

Hey @fruffy I was thinking maybe we could add github bot using github actions for this task. The bot will handle the small tasks like adding labels, replying to FAQs and also the ci/cd troubleshooting integrations. Also this can be a gsoc idea as well. what do you say

[fruffy]

Hey @fruffy I was thinking maybe we could add github bot using github actions for this task. The bot will handle the small tasks like adding labels, replying to FAQs and also the ci/cd troubleshooting integrations. Also this can be a gsoc idea as well. what do you say

I think this might be too small of a task for GSoc, but something fun we could try out. If you know how to do this feel free to get started!

[jafingerhut]

@jafingerhut what are your thoughts on this idea

Sorry, I actually do not have any thoughts about this idea. I'd be happy to try out anything someone comes up with, but have not devoted any time to thinking about the possibilities.

[Vineet1101]

@jafingerhut @fruffy I will start working on this and will show a demo. First thing that i would like to implement is automating the labelling process for example currently someone has to manually add tags on the issues after implementing github bot it can be done automatically by the bot

[fruffy]

We can try this automatic labelling on the P4C repo, which uses a lot of different labels. I am curious how it will work out.

[Vineet1101]

@jafingerhut @fruffy I have raised a PR for the auto-labeling work. I have also included a short video demonstrating the entire workflow. Please review the PR and let me know if any changes are required.

[Vineet1101]

@fruffy do you have any further ideas which I can try to implement using the github actions

[fruffy]

Well, there is also AI-guided code review, which could point out problems in the code contributed by others. But this is difficult to pull off without annoying people.

The main problem we have is that our codebase is too esoteric and complicated for most AI tools. They end up generating garbage. I do not know how to overcome this problem.

[Vineet1101]

Well there's a dosu bot which does solve this probelm of messy repo. you can have a look at it https://dosu.dev/

[fruffy]

Hmm, this looks interesting but I am a little worried about AI bots commenting on issues. We just had a case where a student spammed a lot of the issues with confusing text.

They have a community edition, which is great. But I wonder how we could add this tool safely.

[fruffy]

https://docs.dosu.dev/pages/onboarding-introduction

Looks intriguing, it could handle common issues almost automatically. Examples are in the issues in https://github.com/apache/superset/issues. It could help with our lack of manpower...

The key challenge is to restrain the bot enough so it doesn't annoy users and actually generates output that is useful. Not sure how to test this...

[Vineet1101]

Well I can test it on my fork repo and also search some other open source repos where this dosu bot is implemented to get an idea

[fruffy]

Great! We can try it on smaller p4lang repositories first, too. Maybe p4lang/tutorials. Of course we would need to check this with @jafingerhut first ;)