Breaking Tool Lock-in: How the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) Connects Any IDE to Any Agent

Keynote
Shanghai
1:30 p.m. - 2:10 p.m.
Venue B(Integrated Building, Room 434 Meeting Room)
  • Jun Han Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft Developer Division

    Author of “The Definitive Guide to Visual Studio Code.” Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft’s Developer Division, founder of the VS Code Chinese community, and a code contributor to VS Code. He has written more than 20 VS Code extensions, including the popular Code Runner extension with over 80 million downloads. He writes the “Mastering VS Code” WeChat account and Zhihu column, and has spoken at conferences including QCon, PyCon, JSConf, .NET Conf, Microsoft Tech Summit, Google Developer Group, and COSCon.

    hanjun

Abstract

Grounded in the Python ecosystem, this talk shows how ACP lets developers write code once and reuse their AI capabilities across mainstream editors like Zed, VS Code, and JetBrains.

Details

If LSP freed programming languages from being locked to a specific editor, ACP (Agent Client Protocol) is doing the same thing for the "IDE × Agent" pairing. Hailed as "the LSP of the AI era," this open standard uses JSON-RPC to define a common language between editors and coding agents, letting the same agent run inside VS Code, JetBrains, Zed, Vim, and more — and letting the same IDE swap between different agent backends.

Grounded in the Python ecosystem, this talk shows the real power of ACP: it lets developers write code once and reuse their AI capabilities across mainstream development environments like Zed, VS Code, and JetBrains.