ALL NPPS Members

[Brett Viren <bv AT bnl.gov>]

Hi Shuwei,

No, I have not tried this.  It looks useful.

In general, I've not been able to get "friendly" with aider despite a
couple tries.  That's not to discourage others as I know aider is very
powerful and popular.

In fact, most of my use of Emacs+gtpel is via its chat mode UI.  There,
the big win for me is having the chat session expressed in org-mode
markup (Markdown is an option) and saving it to a regular file on my own
disk.  I can then "grep" the library of chats to revisit and possibly
restart.  That's way more useful than, eg, Gemini's web UI.

The tasks I give the LLM are usually either conceptual planning or
problem solving or they use the LLM as a user/developer manual.
Emacs+gptel has ways to let the LLM directly edit code but I've not yet
gotten friendly with these either.

I guess I'm still a little uncomfortable letting LLM do wholesale code
editing for most of my "real" projects.  Though, I'm not above some
vibing. :)

Cheers,
-Brett.

"Ye, Shuwei" <yesw AT bnl.gov> writes:

> Hi Brett,
>
> Have you tried the aider feature --watch-files? It could provide the inline 
> AI chat
>
> For example,
>
> $ aider --no-git --watch-files /tmp/yesw/Convert-rst.sh
>
> $ vim /tmp/yesw/Convert-rst.sh
>
> Inside the opened file, I can just write something like:
>
> # Define a function to print out the usage help AI!
>
> It will trigger the aider session to read your prompt, insert the function 
> inside that file for you.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --Shuwei
>
>  
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: phys-npps-members-l-request AT lists.bnl.gov 
> <phys-npps-members-l-request AT lists.bnl.gov> on behalf of
> Torre Wenaus <wenaus AT gmail.com>
> Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2025 4:10 PM
> To: Viren, Brett <bviren AT bnl.gov>
> Cc: NPPS members <Phys-npps-members-l AT lists.bnl.gov>; Qian, Xin 
> <xqian AT bnl.gov>; Yu, Haiwang
> <hyu AT bnl.gov>
> Subject: Re: [[Phys-npps-members-l] ] Wed NPPS AI/ML agenda 
>  
> This Message Is From an External Sender 
> This message came from outside your organization. 
>  
>> Emacs+gptel
> Thanks for the tip :-)
>
> On Thu, Sep 11, 2025 at 8:56 AM Brett Viren <bv AT bnl.gov> wrote:
>
>  Torre Wenaus <wenaus AT gmail.com> writes:
>
>  > Is that what you would call comanage with ollama behind? Or...?
>
>  I hadn't heard of COmanage, but reading about it now, it's seems to be a
>  full-featured "auth backend" from InCommon.  My understanding is that
>  Keycloak is the approximate equivalent that is in popular use at BNL.
>
>  So, no, what I meant by "frontend" was the user-touching web app that
>  intermediates between human and "LLM backend" resources for chat type
>  interaction.  This UI frontend could (probably should) use COmanage or
>  Keycloak as an "auth backend".
>
>  I think using Open-WebUI as that UI frontend is a reasonable thing to
>  consider if the security and auth issues can be sorted.  I do wonder how
>  Open-WebUI copes when more users than LLM resources hit it.
>
>  > Today has not been very positive to Open-WebUI!
>
>  Perhaps I need to disclose some caveats of my experience with
>  Open-WebUI.  My usages was almost least-effort:
>
>    $ uv run open-webui serve
>
>  I did go a bit further to try to make it preserve its configuration
>  after a restart, including the unique admin password I would set (and
>  reset...).  I was only partly successful.  Sometimes it held and
>  sometimes it disappeared.  I gave up on that problem and lived with the
>  race between a restart and first login.  Since it was exposed only to
>  localhost, it was a safe race to run.  I'd shutdown the Open-WebUI
>  server when I finished each chat session.
>
>  Presumably, paying more attention can overcome these problems.  Yet more
>  would be needed to use an auth backend.
>
>  The other caveat is that I've stopped using Open-WebUI for the past few
>  months.  It is possible that today's version is better behaved.
>
>  The combination of free Gemini API and Emacs+gptel have fully spoiled me
>  away from Open-WebUI entirely and also reduced my use of Ollama.  But,
>  clearly that's not a solution for Ask PanDA! :)
>
>  -Brett.

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