Add Design Document for AI panel

Frédéric Capletterequested to merge
fc-bp-ai-panel into main

Why is this change being made?

This merge request adds comprehensive documentation for GitLab's AI Panel feature - a side panel that houses various AI-powered tools like chat, history, and sessions. The documentation explains how the panel is designed as a flexible container that can dynamically load different AI applications without tightly coupling them together.

The key architectural decisions covered include: using Vue's dependency injection to configure chat components, integrating with Vue Router for navigation and deep linking, keeping the main panel agnostic about specific AI features it contains, and using Apollo Client's cache as the single source of truth for shared state management.

The documentation also details how permissions are handled across three layers (backend Rails, panel infrastructure, and individual AI apps), and how page context flows from the Rails backend through the panel to AI applications so they can provide relevant assistance based on what page the user is viewing.

The design aims to let different teams work on AI features independently while maintaining consistent behavior across the panel, though it notes current limitations where context passing only works reliably on work item pages rather than throughout GitLab.

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Commits

  • Add BP for AI panel

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