Insights Spike: Search Contexts for Insights

Created by: Joelkw

We have customer and prospect feedback that they want to use search context - like objects to run insights over for the case that is >10 explicit repos and < all repos.

There are multiple "kinds" of search contexts now – search-defined and JSON-defined – and we should aim to support both, ideally from the start, to avoid confusion around communicating only 1 kind of context (and confusion on the frontend as we integrate "you can 1-click from search and it now keeps your context, rather than stripping it").

We should spike to figure out what might be involved for iteration v0 of this feature to ship a first version. This is somewhat a backend and frontend question, perhaps: right now, if you use a context, it flatlines insights to the "current revision" because that's how contexts were originally pinned.

Specific questions from the product POV:

• If we did [x proposal] could you use all search context types? Just some?
• Can we limit persisted insights given a scope to just run over the repos in a context (or should that be a separate exploration), to improve performance?

Not direct questions, but things to think about:

• If we had to ship this with only 1 iteration, what version / what might be build?
• If we had 2 months to do it "perfectly" how would you want to approach it?
• (Is there a way we can make both of those the same :) )