Agents

AgentPane communicates with AI coding agents over the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) — a JSON-RPC 2.0 protocol over stdio. Any agent that implements ACP can be used with AgentPane.

Supported Agents

Claude Code

Anthropic’s agentic coding assistant. Requires claude-code to be installed and an Anthropic API key configured.

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

Codex

OpenAI’s coding agent. Requires codex to be installed and an OpenAI API key configured.

npm install -g @openai/codex

How Providers Work

Each provider is defined with:

• Binary path — The executable to spawn (e.g. claude-agent-acp)
• Spawn arguments — CLI flags passed to the agent
• Display info — Name, short label, and description for the UI

When you start a session, AgentPane:

1. Spawns the agent binary as a child process with stdio: ["pipe", "pipe", "inherit"]
2. Sets up an ACP connection over the agent’s stdin/stdout
3. Creates a session-level event broadcaster for SSE streaming
4. Forwards prompts and receives responses over the JSON-RPC connection

Adding a New Agent

To add support for a new ACP-compatible agent, you need to register it in two places:

1. Backend (apps/server/src/lib/providers.ts) — Add the provider config with binary path and spawn args
2. Frontend (apps/web/src/components/providers.ts) — Add display info (name, label, description)

The agent must implement the ACP protocol — specifically the conversation/sendMessage method and related notification events.