major webui rewrite in progress - please don't submit issues or PR's against the webUI

[Rose22]

as you know, most of openlumara is manually coded. but there is one part that is mostly ai generated - the webUI. and it has gotten far too difficult to maintain!

bugs spring up seemingly out of nowhere, i have difficulties modifying it manually (without AI help) to reflect changes i do to the core, and when i touch one part of it, everything else breaks... it's total spaghetti code with one function pointing to another to another to another and it's just, really bad and unclean, and obviously slop. it was never meant to become the main way to interact with openlumara

it's been taking up most of my dev time, leaving other parts of the framework with unresolved bugs and outdated code, because i keep getting bug reports about the webUI, and i'm constantly busy fixing them.

it's frankly been a thorn in my side lately and it's a good lesson on why (partial) vibecoding is so bad, even if it's "just the frontend". for reference, this doesn't happen with the core, because i wrote it manually

the way i made the webUI is not exactly vibecoding, but it approaches it. i started with a oneshot by a powerful model, then started to refine it through thousands of prompts requesting small tweaks and features, over the course of many months. so it's mostly AI generated, but not exactly vibecoding. however... the tech debt is still very much a thing

i'm going to do it properly this time. in a good framework, with clean code, in my own style. it's going to take time, so please bear with me, and don't submit PR's against the webui

[Rose22]

Screen.Recording.2026-07-18.at.10.19.10.mp4

the rewrite is already well underway! it's still missing a bunch of features from the current webui, but this is going faster than i expected. you can see the progress at https://github.com/Rose22/openlumara/tree/webui-rewrite. the codebase is MUCH cleaner!

[PraxisOG]

I love this project, it helps me a ton with everyday executive function. If you're rewriting the webui, could you change a behavior to make it more consistent with the other channels? Sending slash commands in the webui while the api is down gives an error 503 and doesn't send the message through, as currently it gives the connection error which halts the message send. In every other channel I can send a slash command to a custom module to change or load local models through llama.cpp, but it errors out on the webui unless a model is already loaded. Figured I'd ask here instead of sending a bug report

[Rose22]

I love this project, it helps me a ton with everyday executive function. If you're rewriting the webui, could you change a behavior to make it more consistent with the other channels? Sending slash commands in the webui while the api is down gives an error 503 and doesn't send the message through, as currently it gives the connection error which halts the message send. In every other channel I can send a slash command to a custom module to change or load local models through llama.cpp, but it errors out on the webui unless a model is already loaded. Figured I'd ask here instead of sending a bug report

yup, thats one of the things i tried to fix in the old webui! unfortunately that then broke EVERYTHING in ways i only noticed weeks later, making me have to revert about 3 weeks of work. so the rewrite is very much needed...

right now i'm trying to just get it back to the standards of the old webUI, but after that i want to fix a bunch of bugs like those, as well as make it even more user friendly. oh and support for sending all kinds of multimedia, not just images.

the new webUI is much closer to the core and how all other channels work. i'm also going to rewrite the telegram channel by the way, as that too is mostly ai generated.

[Rose22]

by the way, progress is happening rapidly. i got the settings dialog working:

(and as you can see, themes are working again too)

and toolcall streaming is working (although still a bit janky due to how hard it is to convert partial streamed json to a nice view)

Screen.Recording.2026-07-19.at.11.47.55.mp4

i've also taken the opportunity to make parts of the webui modular, just like the rest of openlumara:

and i'm just getting started when it comes to that. i'll make anything that makes sense modular, so that you can turn off exactly the parts of the webUI you don't want. as with the rest of openlumara, turning off any parts of the webui also stops the code from ever being loaded (such as the javascript and css files)

EDIT: oh btw did i mention that for the webui to work properly, i had to insert a bunch of ai generated code into the core? so this will allow me to finally get rid of all that and get the core back to a pure state (without any ai generated code)