jupyter-sidekick

Jupyter-native access to coding agents over the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) — a per-chat, single-agent experience in JupyterLab, with capability-driven model/mode selectors and slash-command + skill support that comes straight from whatever ACP agent ("harness") you bind a chat to.

Status: early but working. A functioning JupyterLab extension: open a chat in the sidebar (or as draggable main-area tabs), bind an agent, switch models/modes, run slash commands, approve tool calls, and watch it edit your open notebook live. Rough edges remain — see Limitations.

📖 Documentation — install, usage, architecture, and the design rationale.

Install

pip install jupyter-sidekick

Requires JupyterLab ≥ 4.2 and at least one ACP agent on your PATH — e.g. claude-agent-acp (Claude Code) or opencode — or any agent from the ACP registry, which runs on demand. Then launch jupyter lab. For a development install from source, see the docs.

Use

jupyter lab

• Click the chat icon in the left sidebar for the docked assistant, or New ACP Chat in the launcher to open a chat as a main-area tab (open as many as you like; drag/split them however you want).
• Pick an agent, send a message. The model / mode selectors below the input reflect what the agent advertises; type / for its slash commands.
• When the agent wants to use a tool, an approval card appears — allow or reject. Approve a notebook edit and watch the open .ipynb update live.

The idea

A chat is bound to one ACP agent for its life — Claude Code, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Codex, Goose, and so on. The toolbar then surfaces only what that agent advertises over ACP: its available models, its session modes (plan / accept-edits / …), its config options, and its slash commands. Nothing is hard-coded per harness; the UI is driven by the protocol.

This separates two axes that are usually conflated in AI chat UIs:

• Harness — which agent runtime mediates tool use, file I/O, MCP, and sub-agents.
• Model — which LLM that harness is talking to.

…and it leaves a third axis — persona, the bundle of context you bring to a conversation — to be expressed the way the open ecosystem already expresses it: as a Skill or an MCP server the harness loads, not as a bespoke Jupyter object. The reasoning is in docs/personas-as-skills.md.

Why it's in Jupyter at all

Because the agent can edit the notebook you have open, live. The harness writes the .ipynb on disk; JupyterLab's collaborative document layer (jupyter-server-documents) detects the out-of-band change and reflects it into your open notebook view within a second or so — no chat-specific machinery required. That live-document loop is the thing a terminal next to Jupyter can't give you, and it's the reason this is a JupyterLab extension rather than a standalone app.

How it's built

jupyter-sidekick is deliberately a thin, additive layer on open standards:

• agent-client-protocol — the official ACP Python library (the same one every ACP client builds on). All agent communication goes through it.
• @jupyter/chat — the JupyterLab chat widget primitives.
• jupyter-server + its collaborative document layer — for the live notebook-editing loop above.

It does not depend on, fork, or vendor the jupyter-ai persona/router stack. Its dependency graph is part of the argument: a Jupyter-native ACP experience needs none of the persona abstraction. See docs/design-decisions.md (Fork 6) for the full reasoning.

Relationship to Project Jupyter and to Zed

This is an independent, community project — not an official Project Jupyter package, and not affiliated with or endorsed by Zed Industries.

The per-chat single-agent model is inspired by Zed, which co-created ACP and pioneered this interaction design for external agents. ACP is Zed's open protocol, released for exactly this kind of adoption; building on it is how we honor that work. We're grateful for it.

Reference implementation

A working proof-of-concept — the same idea built inside a fork of jupyterlab/jupyter-ai, on top of the jupyter-ai stack — lives at cboettig/jupyter-ai@acp-bridge-impl. jupyter-sidekick is the ground-up redesign that sheds those dependencies; the PoC remains a useful empirical reference for how each piece behaves.

Context

This work is part of an ongoing conversation with the Jupyter AI team about how personas, models, and agent harnesses should relate: jupyterlab/jupyter-ai#1558.

Limitations

Early and honest about it:

• One conversation per panel/tab — no in-panel thread switcher yet (open multiple tabs instead).
• Minimal rendering — agent text + tool-approval cards are shown; rich tool-call/diff and reasoning rendering, and a config-options selector, are not built yet.
• Auth — REST routes are token-authenticated; the streaming websocket is not yet hardened. Run locally.

Development

# Python env (uv or venv); install package + tooling
pip install -e . --group dev --group test
jupyter labextension develop --overwrite .

python -m pytest                  # 37 tests: ACP core, capabilities, binding,
                                  # handlers (real-server), serializer, permission
jlpm build                        # run this after every JavaScript change to rebuild

Layout: jupyter_sidekick/ is the Python server extension (ACP session/binding + REST/websocket handlers, on agent-client-protocol); src/ is the TypeScript labextension (React chat panel); tests/ and validation/ hold the suite and the Step-0 notebook-reflection check.

License

BSD 3-Clause. See LICENSE.