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

[Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2025 at 11:26:19AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:
>On 9/9/25 11:22 AM, 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.
>
>Fully agree, this kind of lazy "oh just waste billions of cycles and
>punt to some AI" bs is just kind of giving up on proper infrastructure
>to support maintainers and developers.

This feels like a false choice: why force a pick between b4-dig-like tooling
and improving our infra? They can work together. As tagging and workflows
improve, those gains will flow into the tools anyway.

It's like saying we should skip -rc releases because they mean we've given up
on bug free code.

Perfect is the enemy of the good. You're arguing against a tool that works now,
just because it's not ideal, and to chase perfection instead. I'd rather be
"lazy" and skip the endless lore hunts.

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha