Ask Lens and AI help

Ask Lens and AI help

Lens can help you read an error, a failing query or a deadlock, and can answer questions about the server. All of it is optional. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you copy a prompt yourself or an admin turns on ai.enabled. With BoxLang+ the Ask Lens page is the full page of the Lensy, a chat that looks at the server with tools. The Copy prompt, Ask ChatGPT and Ask Claude buttons stay on the page.

Three ways to use it

The buttons appear where they help: on an error, on a statement and on the deadlock banner of the Threads page. The Ask Lens page takes a free question of up to 1000 characters.

A viewer can copy a prompt but cannot call the model. Calls from the server need BoxLang+ or a trial. On Free the Ask Lens page says so and the server answers 409. Copy prompt, Ask ChatGPT and Ask Claude stay free.

What a prompt holds

A prompt holds only data that Lens has already redacted, and it is cut at 8000 characters.

• An error prompt holds the type and message, the request id, the method and the path with numbers and ids replaced (no host and no query string), the status and time, the stack frames, the SQL statement, the last queries and the last messages. Credentials are hidden in all the text, and string and number literals in any SQL are replaced by ?.
• A query prompt holds the statement with placeholders, the datasource, the run counts and timings, and where it was called from.
• A deadlock prompt holds each thread's name, state, the lock it waits for, who holds it, and up to 14 frames.
• A question prompt holds your question and a short summary of the server: uptime, heap, thread counts, request totals, the latest error types and messages, slow or failing statements (SQL without literals), the number of running requests and the executor summary.

Passwords, parameter values and the configuration are not in a prompt. Credentials inside URLs and secret-looking key=value parameters are removed from the whole text. Exception messages are passed through the credential masker and the same literal masking as SQL (every quoted string and number becomes ?). No URL, host or query string is sent in a server summary. Still read a prompt before you paste it into a service you do not control. See the data flow.

Let the server call a model

bx-ai is already inside Lens. Set:

{
	"modules": {
		"bxLens": {
			"settings": {
				"ai": {
					"enabled": true,
					"provider": "ollama",
					"model": "llama3.2",
					"apiKey": ""
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

A local provider such as Ollama keeps the prompt inside your network. A hosted provider receives it. The provider settings (not the key) can be changed from the AI page. They are shared by Explain with AI, Ask Lens and the assistant.

BoxLang AI (bx-ai, the 3.6.0 snapshot build) ships inside Lens, in the module's modules folder, and is Apache 2.0 licensed. If a server removes it, Lens still loads, Explain with AI is hidden and the Ask page says the server is not set to call a model. Lens was checked against bx-ai 3.6.0 with a mock Ollama server (harness/mock-ai.py).

Limits on the calls

Explain with AI and the single question button run one AI call at a time, at most 10 per minute, and waits at most 90 seconds for an answer. A call uses a temperature of 0.2. Each call is written to the audit log with its size and provider, not its content. Calls are not blocked by console.readOnly, because they change nothing.