Hi all, We’ve been working on openedx-ai-extensions , a standalone plugin that exposes LLM capabilities to the platform. As part of that work, we investigated whether a plugin can register a new XBlock runtime service — so that any XBlock could call self.runtime.service(self, “ai_extensions”) withou…

What sort of functionality would your new service have, and how would you expect other XBlocks to make use of it? If other XBlocks are going to be built to require the new AI service, then I would lean towards entry points because we’d want to express an actual pip installation dependency. Or possi…

What we want to do is to expose some third party service call capabilities. In this case that third party is a LLM service. Naturally, the xblock could directly call the service, but the extension layer provided by the ai-extensions plugin has build in capabilities for author based configuration of …

This is just an initial idea, but here is how I think about it so far. If we are trying to have a xblock such as ORA have a grading step that uses AI, we would need to have the user_input and some instructions for the AI. This instructions include the prompt, but we have seen that we need more than…

Coming back to this thread with what I think is a much smaller and more idiomatic proposal than the four options in our original ADR which inspired this thread. It takes the proposal in #2, but moves it to openedx/XBlock instead of edx-platform which I also find more fitting. What we found digging …

For the goal of making XBlock runtime services pluggable, I think your proposal is perfectly reasonable. There might be some weird edge cases around initialization because of how runtimes are re-used/re-initialized in the LMS, but those could be managed. My larger concern is that I’m still not convi…

Thanks Dave for such thoughtful responses. This has been exactly the conversation I was hoping to have in order to reach a well tough out solution. Let me go through your assumptions and then get to your concrete proposal at the end. Assumption 1: Implementing as a runtime service does not give u…

One additional thing I want to mention: XBlock services don’t really have well-defined APIs. The API contract is “whatever the service provides is the API”, and it’s not really documented, defined, or enforced in any way other than by python at runtime. In order to define a pluggable service, you n…

Thanks to both again. Rather than keep arguing mechanism in the thread, I took the discussion and wrote it up as an ADR (0012) in the openedx-ai-extensions repo. The main thing it does is separate in two questions that derive from this thread. What capability we expose to consumers (the API surfa…

Plugin-provided XBlock runtime services

Development Architecture

dave (Dave Ormsbee) March 30, 2026, 11:39pm 4

Can you give an example of how high or low-level that API would be, from the consuming XBlock’s perspective (e.g. ORA)?

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Plugin-provided XBlock runtime services

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