Inboxintel/docs/discovery/11-risks-and-future.md

11 — Risk Assessment & Future Opportunities

Risk assessment

Likelihood (L) / Impact (I): H/M/L.

#	Risk	L	I	Mitigation
R1	Full UI redesign destabilises a working app	M	H	Strangler migration behind ui.v2 flag, screen-by-screen; API untouched; ship via the proven develop→staging pipeline; keep old screens until parity verified
R2	VRAM (10 GB) can't hold desired models concurrently	M	M	7–8B sweet-spot (not 14B); embeddings hot + LLM warm + vision on-demand; VRAM guard serialises heavy jobs; small models for high-volume paths
R3	Local AI quality/latency disappoints	M	M	Traditional-first (AI only where it clearly wins); AI advisory + optional; stream responses; cache; model routing lets us swap models without code change
R4	Prompt injection via email content	M	H	Treat all model output as advisory; AI never triggers actions; human/rule confirms; sanitise; SSRF/egress guards; local-only by default
R5	Gmail API quota / sync scale at 100k+ mailboxes	M	M	Batching + Polly backoff (exists); incremental sync; background enrichment queue with backpressure; keyset pagination
R6	Semantic infra (pgvector/embeddings) ops complexity	M	M	Introduce once (v1.2), backfill worker VRAM-aware + resumable; HNSW tuning; feature hides if unavailable
R7	Search relevance regressions vs today	L	M	Lexical hits never lose to fuzzy noise (weighting); benchmark suite as a release gate; keep date-sort as a user option
R8	Scope creep — trying to beat everyone at once	H	M	Roadmap value/effort discipline; MVP is deterministic + small AI; platform features deferred to v3
R9	Solo-dev bandwidth / single-machine staging	H	M	Small shippable features; CI/CD automation already reduces toil; staging owned by automation (don't hand-run it — see memory note)
R10	Mainstream-vs-power tension dilutes the UX	M	M	Progressive disclosure: simple default, power revealed on demand; pointer-first with keyboard as accelerator
R11	Privacy promise broken by a cloud provider option	L	H	Local default; cloud is explicit per-feature opt-in with egress logging + consent; never silent
R12	pgvector image / Ollama container adds deploy friction	L	L	Optional Compose profiles (ai); AI-off deployments omit them entirely

Future opportunities (beyond v3.0)

• Additional mail backends — IMAP/JMAP, Outlook/Graph — become a true multi-provider client.
• On-device personalisation — light fine-tuning / user-preference adapters for priority & tone.
• Calendar & tasks integration — close the loop from extraction to action.
• Voice — dictate replies, "ask your inbox" by voice (local Whisper).
• Plugin marketplace — third-party analyzers/widgets on the analyzer + command-palette APIs.
• Team knowledge base — shared, permissioned knowledge graph across a team inbox.
• Native desktop shell (Tauri) for OS integration, global hotkey, tray, true multi-window.
• Smart compose surfaces — templates that learn, snippet library, per-recipient tone memory.
• Local model upgrades — swap in newer/quantised models as they ship (router makes it a config change).

Recommendation

The foundation is strong and the wedge is real. Proceed with v1.0.0 (redesign + deterministic search + AI foundation) — it's high-value, low-risk, and independent of AI being enabled — then layer local AI in value order. The biggest watch-items are R1 (migration discipline) and R8 (scope); both are controlled by the strangler approach and the value/effort-sequenced roadmap.