Hello Discourse team and community,
First, thank you for the ongoing work on Discourse AI. The feature set is impressive and clearly evolving quickly.
I’d like to propose two UX/admin improvements that would significantly reduce setup time and configuration errors for administrators—especially those managing multiple models/providers or multiple environments (staging/production).
1) LLM model auto-discovery for OpenAI-compatible endpoints
Today, when adding LLMs, administrators often need to manually paste a model ID for each entry. For OpenAI-compatible providers and gateways (e.g., self-hosted OpenAI-compatible endpoints, proxy/gateway layers), it would be extremely helpful if the UI could optionally fetch available models after entering the Base URL + API key.
Suggested UX
- Admin enters Base URL + API key
- Click “Fetch models”
- Discourse calls
/v1/models(or provider-equivalent) - UI presents a searchable dropdown/list
- Admin selects one or more models to add/configure
Notes
- If the endpoint does not support listing, the UI can gracefully fall back to manual model ID entry.
- A refresh button and short-lived caching would be useful, but not required for an initial implementation.
2) Import/Export for Discourse AI configuration
The Discourse AI configuration surface area is large (LLM connections, AI Bot, quotas, feature toggles, etc.). While the flexibility is great, it can be time-consuming and error-prone to set up by clicking through many screens—especially when trying to keep staging and production in sync.
I’d like to request an import/export capability for “Discourse AI configuration” as a whole.
Suggested behavior
- Export all Discourse AI–related settings to a single file (preferably JSON or YAML for round-tripping)
- Import the file to apply settings to another environment or restore a known-good configuration
- Provide a preview/diff and validation (unknown keys, type checks) before applying
Secrets handling
- API keys could be excluded/masked by default, with an explicit opt-in to export them separately if needed.
Optional (nice-to-have)
- A spreadsheet-friendly export (CSV/XLSX) for bulk review/editing, while keeping JSON/YAML as the primary, lossless format.
Why this would help
- Faster onboarding and reconfiguration for admins
- Fewer mistakes from repetitive manual entry
- Better parity between environments (staging/prod)
- Easier auditing and change management via diffs/version control
Questions:
- Is there an existing recommended “bulk configuration” approach (Admin API / Rails console) that could be formalized into an import/export workflow?
- Would model discovery be acceptable at least for OpenAI-compatible endpoints where
/v1/modelsis available?
Thanks for considering this request. I’m happy to provide additional details, example workflows, or screenshots of the current setup steps if that would be helpful.
Best regards,