ACP

An open-standard protocol designed to enable seamless interoperability between AI coding agents and integrated development environments (IDEs).

ACP technology (Agent Client Protocol) solves the fragmentation problem in AI-assisted development by providing a unified communication layer between agents and editors. Developed as a collaboration between JetBrains and Zed, it uses JSON-RPC to handle file system access, terminal control, and context sharing without vendor lock-in. This allows developers to plug any compliant agent (like a custom internal LLM) into their preferred IDE using a single integration. By standardizing the conversation between the tool and the agent, ACP reduces the engineering overhead of building one-off plugins for every new AI model.

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/agent-client-protocol/