[FR] Improve AI search, avoid hitting maximum context length

[rgpublic]

I think the AI search ("Ask") feature could be improved a lot. Right now, you can quickly select one repository or do a global search with one click. It's quite tedious to select individual repos and if you have a global question it's often unclear which repositories you should select in the first place. Sourcebot' most powerful feature is to be able to search globally.

nfortunately, it's too easy to hit the maximum context size of a model. I think the AI feature should be a bit more intelligent on what it does. For example, one of the most frequent questions we have is: "Where do I find...."? For example: "Where do I find the arrow icon image file?" etc.

In this case, it should perhaps first find out which files might be affected at all (PNG, JPEG, SVG). Then it should search over filenames and paths only and see whether it could answer the question that way. Perhaps it should even automatically try to segment the search and search iteratively over chunks of e.g. 16 repositories. I think a lot more stuff could be done to make this feature work better. Right now most global searches end without an answer due to context limits.

[msukkari]

Thanks for the feedback @rgpublic , there's definitely a lot of improvements that can be made to Ask and it's something we're thinking a lot about! Will keep this issue open and reference improvements as we ship them