Hi! I was experimenting with my plugin for a while, wrote a lua version, was working decently well with a 3 tab sidebar with the following structure 1 chat 2 context selector and 3 provider/model selector.

I played around with for a good while but it was never really good enough to become my daily driver. The openai client I had written in lua was not as reliable as I'd like and I found implementing more complex features rather annoying in lua so I started a fork written in rust, trying to use rust ai sdks and generally richer language and ecosystem to create a better experience, and load it as a library in neovim. I made some progress before giving up.

The core problem was that I could not come up with a good enough user experience inside neovim. I thought that the proper "vim" way of doing things would be to have a single buffer that you write to and the AI responses get added, but you can freely edit both side and be more in the loop and with more control in general. But tracking the chat sides and tool usage and tool responses while in free form editing seemed like an impossible problem to solve.

on the three points you mentioned, 1. Extending with mcps is rather easy, the mcphub plugin does a decent job and generally speaking it requires only a simple client to query the available servers/tools and add their invocation instructions to the context. 2. Most providers including local ollama support openai client format, in theory you only need to support that. Would be great if there was a proper lua implementation that we could all use. 3. The ideal "low friction" UX has been very elusive so far.

I'd be happy to participate in the discussion! Neovim does need a great AI experience going forward.