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Agent Client Protocol (ACP) standardizes communication between coding agents and code editors or IDEs. With the ACP protocol, you can make use of your custom deep agents with any ACP-compatible client, allowing your code editor to provide project context and receive rich updates.
ACP is designed for agent-editor integrations. If you want your agent to call tools hosted by external servers, see Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Quickstart

Install the ACP integration package:
Then expose a deep agent over ACP. This starts an ACP server in stdio mode (it reads requests from stdin and writes responses to stdout). In practice, you usually run this as a command launched by an ACP client (for example, your editor), which then communicates with the server over stdio.

Example coding agent

The deepagents-acp package includes an example coding agent with filesystem and shell that you can run out of the box.

Clients

Deep agents work anywhere you can run an ACP agent server. Some notable ACP clients include:

Zed

The deepagents repo includes a demo ACP entrypoint you can register with Zed:
  1. Clone the deepagents repo and install dependencies:
  1. Configure credentials for the demo agent:
Then set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in .env.
  1. Configure your ACP agent server command in Zed’s settings.json:
  1. Open Zed’s Agents panel and start a Deep Agents thread.

Toad

If you want to run an ACP agent server as a local dev tool, you can use Toad to manage the process.
See the upstream ACP docs for protocol details and editor support: