The last day and a half have brought a lot of interesting ideas into play. These are a major focus for Humbug v49.
Document processing
I used Humbug for a lot of things, but increasingly I'm using it to review documents. A lot of features have been added in the last couple of months to make this easier.
Markdown has been a fundamental element of the design since its inception, but while this is great for engineers, it's less great for the rest of the world. Most of the world's docs are either PDF or DOCX (Microsoft Word).
PDF will have to wait, but DOCX and Markdown have a lot of similar features so I built a document intermediate representation (`document_ir`) and converters both to and from both DOCX and Markdown. There are stand-alone conversion tools in the tools directory but more importantly there's now a new AI tool, `document_convert_ai_tool` that will let an AI do this for you.
Gemma 4 QAT
Google always do really interesting things. This caught my eye today because I've long wanted a very capable local model that can be an always-on companion within Humbug while more capable cloud models will be introduced as needed.
I will experiment with this some more in the future.
Signs of interesting things
A couple of days ago I added support for the AI to use a Menai program to edit files or editor buffers. This felt like it would be a really useful feature but I've not actually seen it used. Today I have seen it used when the AI couldn't work out how to handle a character escaping problem.
Previously it would have always tried to do this with `sed` or by writing a python script!