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Google and Zed push protocol to pry AI agents out of VS Code’s clutches

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AI + ML

Google and Zed push protocol to pry AI agents out of VS Code’s clutches

Because not every bot wants to live inside Microsoft’s walled garden

Google and code editor company Zed Industries have introduced the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) as a standard way for AI agents to integrate with an IDE, with the idea that this will prevent developers getting locked into VS Code.

« AI coding agents and editors are tightly coupled but interoperability isn’t the default, » states the overview for the new protocol, complaining that « every new agent-editor combination requires custom work. »

Microsoft’s VS Code is the most popular programmer’s editor and IDE, and the company has loaded it with AI features, many of which are specific to GitHub Copilot. Some AI competitors have forked VS Code in order to integrate smoothly with their own offerings, but it is not an ideal solution, particularly as Microsoft controls the VS Code marketplace for extensions.

ACP, which is still under development, is a standardized protocol for agent-editor communication. Agent processes are started by the code editor and communicate using JSON-RPC over stdio (standard input/output). ACP reuses MCP (Model Context Protocol) specifications where possible, while also adding its own custom types. Formatted text is based on Markdown.

Libraries that implement ACP are provided for both TypeScript and Rust.

According to a post by Zed CEO and co-founder Nathan Sobo, the ACP project was initiated by Google, whose Gemini command-line interface (CLI) team were using Zed and wanted deeper integration. The consequence is that Zed is currently the only editor with immediate support, though there is also an extension for Neovim. The only ACP agent is Gemini CLI, which is the current reference implementation. This feature in Gemini CLI, which is open source, was originally called Zed integration schema upgrade.

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