Deliverable: Give teams control to disable FlowFuse Expert

Open
  • Is something wrong?
#233 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Maintainers usually reply within 1 day

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
38/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
javascript
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start by reviewing the @flowfuse/nr-assistant package and related PR #7007, then trace how team settings reach the assistant and how Expert is distinguished from other assistant features. Done means a team owner can disable and re-enable Expert, users receive the stated transparency guidance, and non-Expert assistant behavior remains functional; use the linked Slack thread for context.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

Problem

Customers need to trust that FlowFuse Expert respects their data governance requirements. Today, there is no way for a team owner to disable FlowFuse Expert — the only options are "don't use it" or manually removing the assistant plugin via Node-RED's palette manager. Neither is acceptable for organizations with strict policies around AI tooling.

This is a trust and adoption blocker: teams that cannot explicitly opt out are less likely to adopt FlowFuse at all, even when FlowFuse Expert would benefit other teams in the same organization.

Goal

Provide a first-class, team-level setting that lets team owners disable FlowFuse Expert for their team — with clear communication about what the feature does, what data flows when it's used (and that nothing flows when it's not), and a path to re-enable it.

Key Principles

  • Transparency over restriction: Even when disabled, the UI should inform users about what FlowFuse Expert is and why it exists — not hide it entirely
  • No data without action: Regardless of the toggle state, no data is externalized to AI providers unless a user actively sends a prompt. The setting is an organizational policy control, not a data leak fix
  • Separate Expert from Assistant: The @flowfuse/nr-assistant package provides functionality beyond FlowFuse Expert (e.g., tab title sync, future platform integrations). Disabling Expert must not break non-Expert assistant features

Context

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
5
Forks
5
Avg merge
1d 5m
Merged PRs (30d)
29

Getting set up

This project ships no dev container, Dockerfile or contributing guide, so setting up is up to you: start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from FlowFuse/nr-assistant

All issues in FlowFuse/nr-assistant

Similar issues

More JavaScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.