Version-1 changes for Maple Chatbot pr_2198_bot by vkavith · Pull Request #2218 · codeforboston/maple

vkavith · 2026-08-19T01:12:02Z

Summary

Maple Chatbot where a User can ask Questions about Bill/Policy issue question answering chat

ReAct AI agent with tool calling and reasoning loop capability

Access to firebase vector index search

Add a short summary of the changes, and a reference to the original issue using # and the issue number, like #1

Checklist

On the frontend, I've made my strings translate-able.
If I've added shared components, I've added a storybook story.
I've made pages responsive and look good on mobile.
If I've added new Firestore queries, I've added any new required indexes to firestore.indexes.json (Please do not only create indexes through the Firebase Web UI, even though the error messages may reccommend it - indexes created this way may be obliterated by subsequent deploys)

Screenshots

Add some screenshots highlighting your changes.

Known issues

If you've run against limitations or caveats, include them here. Include follow-up issues as well.

Steps to test/reproduce

For each feature or bug fix, create a step by step list for how a reviewer can test it out. E.g.:

Go to the home page
Click on a testimony
See that it's loaded with a loading spinner

vercel · 2026-08-19T01:12:08Z

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
maple-dev	Ready	Preview	Aug 28, 2026 7:36pm

nesanders · 2026-08-19T01:23:49Z

venv to be removed

nesanders · 2026-08-19T01:24:13Z

Code in llm/ not relevant to this PR, so I recommend not modifying the requirements here

nesanders

This is initial high level feedback.

nesanders · 2026-08-19T01:24:50Z

@@ -0,0 +1,104 @@
+import { useState, useRef, useEffect } from "react"


A big open question is if we should be authoring our own chat widget or adopting a framework like copilotkit instead.

nesanders · 2026-08-19T01:37:26Z

+
+  // Logged-in users: persistent monthly token budget, tracked in the
+  // top-level `llmUsage` collection (see usage.ts).
+  loggedInMonthlyTokenBudget: 50_000


These default budgets might be too small to be useful for either logged in or anonymous users, but we can modify later

We discussed that we can decide on changing this later

nesanders · 2026-08-19T01:41:17Z

+---
+
+## Backfilling Existing Documents
+


Is there anything we actually need to backfill? I think we already have the relevant embeddings for bills, questions, and testimony in the index.

From our discussion, sounds liek this is extraneous and can be deleted

nesanders · 2026-08-19T01:42:19Z

    "rimraf": "^3.0.2",
    "ts-jest": "^29.2.5",
-    "typescript": "4.5.5"
+    "typescript": "^5.5.4"


I don't think we will update typescript version as part of this PR, though w may do so later for other reasons

You updated this - thanks! However, you are adding the carrot in ("^") - I don't think we need to do that, either.

nesanders · 2026-08-19T01:46:56Z

+import { httpsCallable } from "firebase/functions"
+import { functions } from "components/firebase"
+import { useAuth } from "components/auth"
+import styles from "./ChatWidget.module.css"


i think we need to add a mock frontend pag that just exposes this widget on a placeholder page for initial testing purposes.

This is outstanding

nesanders · 2026-08-26T00:41:07Z

+
+  // Merge by interleaving: pick the lower-rank item from each list at each
+  // step, which preserves the relative relevance ordering from Firestore.
+  const merged: string[] = []


We should document the design decision of why we are returnign interleaved resuls for bills and BQs. If this is the same logic as the MCP server, we should import from there or modularize the function into a different module. If it is different logic, we should explain why.

nesanders · 2026-08-26T01:10:56Z

Just noting - this PR does not yet introduce a data model for storing user chat histories. We should either introduce a basic framework for this here or capture an issue to do so later.

We should be able to use https://reference.langchain.com/python/langchain-community/chat_message_histories/firestore/FirestoreChatMessageHistory for this. We will need to decide whether to add this as a separate firestore db or as a new collection or something else. it is a top priority to enforce user-level access so each user can only access their own conversation history.

nesanders · 2026-08-26T01:35:48Z

To keep the context size limited and avoid spending a lot of tokens, the bill retrieval search tool should by default retrieve only the summary field of the bill document. The fulltext should be retrievable by the tool, too, but not by default.

nesanders · 2026-08-26T02:41:57Z

      allow read: if true;
      allow write: if false;
    }
+<<<<<<< HEAD


This is a dangling merge error that needs to be cleaned up.

nesanders · 2026-08-26T02:43:07Z

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+export const LLM_CONFIG = {


Just a note: We also need a top level circuit breaker. Regardless of the individual usage limits below, we need to configure a limit on the total monthly spend of the feature so it doesn't go out of control. We could potentially configure that at the google cloud project level, not necessarily in the code here.

nesanders · 2026-08-26T02:44:25Z

+ */
+export const askQuestion = functions
+  .runWith({ timeoutSeconds: 120, memory: "512MB" })
+  .https.onCall(async (data, context) => {


We will need some limit to scaling here to prevent overuse. A maxinstances limit here might help.

nesanders · 2026-08-28T19:39:53Z

-  }
-
-  return merged.slice(0, topK * 2).join("\n\n")
+  // Merge all results and sort by relevance score descending — same approach


Even if we don't modularize the relevance score logic between the MCP server and chat agent tools, can we at least cite the alignment betwen them by linking here?

maple/mcp-server/tools.ts

Line 617 in 7a1fad3

// Bills (H1234) and ballot questions (25-12) have structurally distinct IDs —

It would be ideal to modularize and import this logic from a single function def, but it is ok if we do not do that in this PR.

Version-1 changes for Maple Chatbot pr_2198_bot

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vkavith requested review from Mephistic, alexjball, kiminkim724, mertbagt, mvictor55, nesanders, sashamaryl and timblais as code owners August 19, 2026 01:12

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Introduce memory management for chatbot #2225

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PR code changes for policySearch.ts to resemble mcp_server folder

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		@@ -0,0 +1,104 @@
		import { useState, useRef, useEffect } from "react"

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vkavith commented Aug 19, 2026

Summary

Maple Chatbot where a User can ask Questions about Bill/Policy issue question answering chat

ReAct AI agent with tool calling and reasoning loop capability

Access to firebase vector index search

Checklist

Screenshots

Known issues

Steps to test/reproduce

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nesanders commented Aug 26, 2026 • edited Loading Uh oh! There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

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vercel Bot commented Aug 19, 2026 •

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