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Fingers crossed for this - it seems like Zed is kinda “going back to the roots” (of working on collaboration) and leaving this in place to disrupt the agentic IDE category (and make themselves not have to spend time on competing in it).

Curious to see how adoption among cli agents will go (it’s nice to see Gemini cli already in).

The level of competition in the LLM and coding assistant market is always nice to see, and this only helps to make costs of switching between offerings even smaller.

I really hope that APC will get the necessary traction from the community, even if I suspect that many standards that are currently proposed in the LLM field will be abandoned soon.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Does anyone else find it funny that LLMs need a protocol to execute tooling? Like, it understands language, right?

The big question is why it can't be just a LSP server or extension to the LSP protocol to provide all that might be needed by the LLM.

Claude, come up with a protocol for communicating between AI agents and IDEs/editors. Create node, python and rust libraries. Create a website with a landing page

So much negativity in this thread. After seeing the recent demo of gemini cli working in zed, I'm actually pretty excited for standardization in this space.

Helix has been my favorite editor ever since I started using it, but the lack of integrated AI features has been becoming more of a deal-breaker for me lately. Though, I can see why the maintainers are hesitant to build for it, because there hasn't been a standardized protocol. I hope ACP changes that.

I really wish Anthropic will adopt this for Claude Code, and I hope it provides at least the kind of integration they have with VS Code. Would be nice if it had access to at least diagnostics from the editor.

Zed should start improving the diff view. It's one of the worst. It does not even have word level diff highlight or split diff view

How's this better than MCP?

I don’t see why we need so many protocols. In such a greenfield tech, many are eager to define rules. There’s already a protocol called AG-UI that does the similar thing, but even its purpose isn’t entirely clear to me.

Rather than rushing to create standards, I think the focus should be on building practical implementations, AI-centric UI components that actually help developers design more AI-friendly interfaces. Once the space matures and stabilizes, that’s when standardization will make more sense. Right now, it feels too early.

I would love it, but please don't add JSON-RPC to the world... It's too heavy for editor.

I love this idea; I hope it gains traction. One thing that is not clear to me is file search vs unsaved files. It's common for agents to use, e.g., ripgrep to search the file system. But if the communication protocol includes read/write access to unsaved files, there is a desync in terms of accuracy.. rg can't search unsaved files.

I feel these solutions are approaching the problem backward. What I want is not a Claude Code in my Neovim but a Neovim in my Claude Code. That is, when the agent fails, I am able to hop in momentarily with all the perks of an IDE (ie: type-setter, LSP, etc.) and do some editing and then give control back to the agent.

Another discussion on the same topic from 3 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45038710

naming things isn't that hard. at least put something with AI/LLM and code/IDE in the name.

I see they've also caught the RFC2119 bug. This "MUST", "SHALL", "MAY" thing is a linguistic blight on our standards landscape and should be eradicated. HTML5 is written without this unnecessary level of linguistic pretense and works fine.

If your proposed spec is full of "SHALL", "MUST", and "MAY", I'm going to dock you ten points of credibility from the outset. It's a signal you've set out to imitate the vibes of seminal RFC specs without independently considering the substance.

The protocol for interacting with code is files and text.

You need to define an interface for Ai to click buttons? Or to create keyboard macros that simulate clicking buttons? We are all doomed!

The folks that makes CodeCompagnion are doing interesting things!

Why don’t they focus on IDE first? I still can’t use their IDE as my daily. They also need to hire someone for UI. It took me 10 minutes to figure out how to bring up their AI chat window.

I’ve been writing a tool to enable Claude Code to use ACP (because I use CC and Zed a lot) and so far I’ve been pretty successful (using the Claude Code SDK and the ACP Client library) although there are some rough edges. I will polish it a little bit and publish it tomorrow I guess.

the difference between using, for example, Gemini via ACP vs Gemini via the ide own agent is not so clear

MCP also started as JSON-RPC over stdio. With solutions like GitHub Codespaces, devcontainers, or "background agents", I wonder if we'll see the development of JSON over SSE.

Currently, my environment uses Claude Code on bare metal, and my application runs in a container, and the agent can do "docker compose exec backend" without any restrictions (YOLO).

My biggest obstacles to adopting workflows with git worktree are the need to share the database engine (local resource constrains) and the initial migration time. Offloading to cloud might be interesting for that.

I’m going to be hungry all day, everyday if this catches on and we call it ACP

I'm fine with treating AI like a human developer:

I ask AI to write a feature (or fix a bug, or do a refactoring) and then I read the commit. If the commit is not to my liking, I "git reset --hard", improve my prompt and ask the AI to do the task again.

I call this "prompt coding":

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

This way, there is no interaction between my coding environment and the AI at all. Just like working with a human developer does not involve them doing anything in my editor.

With already https://agentcommunicationprotocol.dev (ACP) same name seems confusing now. even though differences are there in both.

It's interesting to see that there's the beginnings of an implementation for Claude Code, here:

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/crates%2Fage...

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@zed-industries/claude-code-ac...

Even though that doesn't seem to be mentioned on the site yet.

Really hope for this to get traction so I’m not bound to the usual IDE

when is it coming to vscode?