I was recently using Q CLI to implement a new feature and noticed it struggling in an unexpected way. It had managed to implement the feature incredibly quickly in 4-5 iterations but was struggling when it came to updating all the tests impacted by the change. In particular, it was repeatedly running into issues editing large text files either because the string it was trying to replace wasn’t present or was present in more than one location in the file. I had seen this happen before: typically it would try in vain for a while and eventually either give up or use command-line tools to edit the file.

Imagine this: You’re building some kind of a chat system. For every message from the user, you want to figure out what the message is about. Is the user asking a question? Or does the user asking to perform a specific action? Or is the user talking about something completely irrelevant to your system?

What we are doing here is detecting the “intent” of the user’s message. Think of the intent as a set of predefined categories like QUESTION, ACTION1, ACTION2, OUT_OF_DOMAIN.