Clarification on Project Direction: Chipathon Assistant vs Bazel Migration

[Vi-shub]

Hi Team,

I have been actively engaging with OpenROAD/ORFS through issue analysis, debugging flow-related problems, and contributing to discussions. Based on this, I have already prepared a proposal for the Chipathon Knowledge Hub + Ask Chipathon assistant, focusing on improving debugging workflows and reducing repeated mentor load.

While reviewing the GSoC ideas list, I also found the Bazel migration project interesting from an infrastructure perspective.

I wanted to ask:

Which of these areas currently has higher priority or impact for the project?
How mature is the Bazel migration effort, and what would be expected from a GSoC contributor?

I would like to align my contributions where they are most useful to the OpenROAD ecosystem.

Thanks :)

[Vi-shub]

@maliberty any thoughts or suggestions?

[maliberty]

Bazel is fairly far along but there is plenty of refinements left and bazel-orfs could be considered if we need more tasks. Its hard to compare to Chipathon as it is totally different. I'm not sure what "debugging workflows and reducing repeated mentor load" covers but those are important areas as well.