This protocol is implemented by zed industries (https://agentclientprotocol.com), for communication between editors and genai agents.
It’s implemented in zed obviously (https://zed.dev/blog/bring-your-own-agent-to-zed) and in neovim, so I wanted to suggest it as an idea for sublime text also, in a manner as LSP-copilot chat, for example.
It looks like there is significant overlap with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) which is used by VS Code (I might be wrong because I didn’t take a very close look yet).
I think the biggest obstacle for a Sublime plugin is that the UI is restricted by what is available in the ST API (input handlers, output panels, HTML sheets, …) and therefore they have to fiddle with all kinds of workarounds to utilize these generic components for the UI. On the other hand VS Code and Zed seem to intend to make the AI stuff directly a part of the editor, so they can put a lot of effort in implementing UI components that are specifically designed for the communication with AI agents / LLM.
I don’t know about ACP but MCP is a security nightmare. Nobody should be using that on their computer in its current state. It’s horrifying that anyone does. I’ll assume after a brief search that ACP creates similar vulnerabilities.
It’s not my business if someone wants to punch a Boeing-sized security hole in their Sublime Text editor by installing a dangerous plugin, but I certainly hope Sublime HQ does not spend any developer cycles supporting such endeavors in the core editor, including making such plugins easier to create. There are way too many other more productive things they could be doing.
Yes, it is similar to Anthropic’s MCP, it’s the same idea with little overhead to make it work.
Besides Gemini CLI and Claude code, Qwen code and opencode are already in implementation phase
A minimal interface such as is provided by the aforementioned LSP-copilot would suffice for most user cases, and AFAIK it can be done without such ACP implementation.
Particularly, a more generic version that is able to use local models would be a great extension, now that
Yollama seems to have died.
I wanted to share my concrete implementation that I’ve been working on: GeminiCLI . It integrates the google/gemini-cli directly into Sublime Text using its --acp flag. It demonstrates how we can effectively leverage agent cli in sublime text.
❯ at the last line of the view as prompt. the plugin heavily use the Phantom API to process permission dialogs and diff review.
This approach shows that agent cli is highly viable in Sublime Text when combined with Phantoms, command palette, and EditView.
I have invented my own AI Shuttle Protocol ® where like Artemis II I depatch an XML container with payload to AIAgents (including Rules of Engagement) and have it returned ready to deploy immediately at Edge User after first scrutinising returned payload. I can inspect in Subl Text and prepare in Subl Text.