Remove Clowder from SILNLP

[benjaminking]

Clowder unfortunately has not seen widespread use, nor has it received updates and support, and so there is a good chance that it is not even functional at the moment. At this point, the best course of action is to probably to remove Clowder to simplify further SILNLP develpment.

(its intended functionality may end up being superseded by AI agents that can orchestrate multiple related jobs)

[Enkidu93]

Clowder unfortunately has not seen widespread use, nor has it received updates and support, and so there is a good chance that it is not even functional at the moment. At this point, the best course of action is to probably to remove Clowder to simplify further SILNLP develpment.

(its intended functionality may end up being superseded by AI agents that can orchestrate multiple related jobs)

I think this is a duplicate(ish) of #898. I'd be glad if you'd let me do this one 😁 - whenever you'd like to see it done.

I am interested to see if you've had luck with the AI agents for silnlp. In my experience, they are surprisingly bad with numbers - even just copy-pasting them.

[bhartmoore]

Would Clowder (perhaps minus the slow front-end) be relevant to research work requiring a multiplicity of models (and results collection)? Any thoughts from @TaperChipmunk32 based on your experience with the Crossbow project?

[TaperChipmunk32]

@bhartmoore I did not use it for my Crossbow experiments, because I found it confusing to figure out how it actually works. It was much simpler for me to just write a few quick scripts to setup all of my configs and run the experiments. I think Clowder would either need a lot of updating and reworking or rebuilt completely to be very useful. I think removing it is the best idea for now, maybe we could create a new version sometime in the future.

[Enkidu93]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Isaac was the only one (besides me) who ever used it for research in bulk. He had good success and found things pretty straightforward from the README, but like Ben and Matthew have said, it's not been updated so would likely require some revamping and even if it works beautifully as-is, 'acceptability' is a key property as well 😉 😁.

[benjaminking]

I forgot that we had the other issue for this. I will work on merging them. And @Enkidu93, you are welcome to work on this whenever you would like, but it is not urgent.

I do agree in general that there is still a need for orchestration of related jobs. I'm hopeful that AI agents might eventually fill this role. (and hopefully we can iron out the issues that Eli mentioned)