Re: Revised IETF LLM Tools

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

Hi Tim,

Like any tool, it absolutely can be misused. Deferring judgment to it is not what it's designed for, and the accompanying skills steer pretty hard away from that:
  https://github.com/mnot/ietf-skill
Of course, they can always be improved.

I started working on this because I observed a large and growing amount of LLM use in IETF participation, and think we need to have guiderails for its use. Part of that is carrot (ietf-llm and ietf-skill) and part of it is stick -- policies which the community needs to have a discussion about.

I'm talking about this more in RASPRG next week.

Cheers,


> On 14 Jul 2026, at 5:20 pm, Tim Bray <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Anyone but me think this whole idea is deeply misguided?  In most WGs on most occasions, consensus is obvious, and when it isn’t is when you absolutely don’t want to defer judgment to an LLM.
> 
> But maybe I’m in the rough here. -Tim
> 
> On Jul 14, 2026 at 8:07:46 AM, Rohan Mahy <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> Mark,
>> You email archive tool strips quoted lines, so how do you deal with inline comments and +1 on specific quoted paragraphs?
>> 
>> thanks,
>> -rohan
>> 
>> On Thu, 28 May 2026, 00:01 Mark Nottingham, <mnot=[e-mail]> wrote:
>> Hey all,
>> 
>> I've revised and renamed the tools below; it now includes a local MCP server. In my testing, it's pretty effective; you can chat away with a working group's corpus pretty to pretty good effect from eg Claude, OpenCode, etc.
>> 
>>   https://pypi.org/project/ietf-llm/
>> 
>> Still under development, but suggestions / issues welcome.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> 
>> > On 19 Mar 2026, at 11:07 am, Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> > 
>> > Just thought I'd convey something I found useful for understanding the state of a WG's discussions.
>> > 
>> > Google's NotebookLM:
>> >  https://notebooklm.google.com/
>> > allows you to ground a LLM in a specific set of documents. 
>> > 
>> > I've put all of the materials I have for the AIPREF Working Group into a notebook, including:
>> > 
>> > - the Charter
>> > - meeting agendas
>> > - meeting minutes
>> > - drafts (including all revisions)
>> > - mailing list archives
>> > 
>> > The result is an LLM I can chat with about the history and arguments made in the WG. Although (of course) I can't trust it completely, I'm finding it's a very good way to interact with the 'memory' of a WG. In particular it can serve as 'another set of eyes' that doesn't have the biases that I may have.
>> > 
>> > For the mailing list archive, I found that NotebookLM doesn't like just taking an mbox file, so I* wrote a script to pre-process an archive by stripping attachments, simplifying headers, and removing quoted material. See:
>> > https://gist.github.com/mnot/7c0c87f3bf3cc5bbcc97acb57eb1e332
>> > 
>> > The main issue I have now is keeping it up-to-date.
>> > 
>> > Hope this helps,
>> > 
>> > 
>> > 
>> > * Gemini
>> > 
>> > --
>> > Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/
>> > 
>> 
>> --
>> Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/
>> 

--
Mark Nottingham   https://mnot.net/