Recommending books based on reading history is one of the very few uses of AI I'd consider good. With enough metadata about books it will be able to recommend similarities better than anyone, with appropriate topical filters. Storygraph is a Goodreads alternative trying to make use of this.
It would probably be better to use a deterministic graph algorithm to do this, but it's seemingly too hard for anyone to do properly.
If anything, it took time away from improving Calibre's UI and user-friendliness. I use it weekly, but by the gods, it's neither pretty nor friendly.
Calibre has had a comically obtuse and amateur UI for over a decade. I don't think anyone working on it is spending time on a grand beautiful UI redesign (which would be really hard, both in effort and in politics). So I don't think it's fair to complain that anytime someone adds a feature you don't use that is taking time away from UI work.
I wasn't complaining, I don't mind whichever feature an open-source freely-available project I use weekly wants to work on. I did suggest these features might have taken some effort, and opportunity cost dictates it wasn't spent elsewhere.
Does it make use of LM studio for all of those features? I feel the features can simply be ignored by anyone who doesn't want to use them.
- Allow asking AI questions about any book in your calibre library.
- Right click the "View" button and choose "Discuss selected book(s) with AI"
- AI: Allow asking AI what book to read next by right clicking on a book and using the "Similar books" menu
- AI: Add a new backend for "LM Studio" which allows running various AI models locally
It seems pretty harmless really.
I understand some people feel that AI is overhyped and don't particularly like it, but this level of weird knee-jerk "anything AI is the devil incarnate" response is just as ridiculous, IMO.