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Follow-up: Web IDE "Where we are headed" feedback

The following discussion from !54854 (merged) should be addressed:

  • @jramsay started a discussion: (+2 comments)

    First step, look back to your primary problem statement, and then your personas. I proposed something like: "The Web IDE exists to create new modes of collaboration and efficiency, to improve productivity, code quality, and reduce cycle time."

    • Are there areas of collaboration that are inefficient in the development flow or merge request the IDE could improve?
    • Are there code quality challenges the IDE could improve?
    • Are there personas that are struggling to contribute which slows down the development cycle?

    I'd try to define two or three mountain peaks in the distance that would materially improve one or more of these. It should be big enough that you don't know how to get there in 3 months, but you can iterate towards. Here's one idea based on our previous discussions:

    Merge Requests are primarily places of discussion, rather than places of concrete proposals. Features like "suggested changes" offer a glimpse of reviewers providing concrete proposals and improvements, but are limited by the limitations of a diff view and composing a suggestion in a Markdown composer.

    This would tie together a huge variety of improvements and provide a workflow for prioritization. Consider:

    • if I am going to make a large suggestion, I don't want that suggestion to break a green build. I therefore need to run CI jobs
    • if I am going to make a suggestion to YAML, JSON, Codeowners or other technical files, I want some help not to break them
    • it also highlights that these improvements alone are priarily useful to the MR author. A reviewer is probably not wanting to commit substantial changes directly through the Web IDE. Maybe the Web IDE would benefit from deeper integration with merge requests to allow a suggestion that spans many files?
    • interestingly this leads to very natural flow into merge request discussions in the Web IDE, perhaps initially purely as composing a very large suggestion that needs a comment, then maybe multiple comments...
Edited by Kai Armstrong