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Hi HN, I built Panel because research work means switching all the time between a chat with an agent, the papers I'm reading, the notebook I'm running and the d
by greentfrapp 17d ago
Hi HN, I built Panel because research work means switching all the time between a chat with an agent, the papers I'm reading, the notebook I'm running and the data files I'm looking at.
Panel is a local web app with dockable panes made with dockview. You get chat, files, PDFs, markdown and Jupyter notebooks.
The agent can also create custom panes on request, like a protein structure viewer or an SQLite browser.
There's also an early "Module" system. Modules are like Skills, but with typed inputs, outputs and intermediates, so a long job shows its progress and its results can feed the next step. Right now the working one is a literature review, with an early version for hypothesis generation.
How it's built: a Vue + dockview frontend and a Python (FastAPI) sidecar that drives the agent backends. Everything runs on your machine.
Honest limits for now:
- Full support is Claude Code only, so you need it installed and signed in. Codex and other harnesses are not supported yet.
- Still very rough around the edges, I've been adding to it as I use it myself. Feedback welcome!
MIT licensed.
- purple-leafy 17d agoLook into openrouter so you aren’t tied to just Claude or codex
- greentfrapp 17d agoI will! Thanks for the rec
- xtiansimon 16d agoI’m not familiar with this concept. So the purpose is to have a chat llm spawn new independent activity windows all in the same chat context?
- greentfrapp 15d agoActually it's something like a researcher-focused app that allows you to open Jupyter notebooks, code snippets, PDFs, right next to the chat window pane. Let's say you're working on protein design and you want to view the 3D structure of the protein, you can have the agent build a pane for that in the app, and you can ask the agent to help customize it as well.
- wek 15d agoThis is cool! We have a similar approach in Nimbalyst... agent makes extensions that are human editable and agent editable ... includes Jupyter, markdown, csv, excalidraw, code, pdfs, browser. Its so nice not to have to app switch all the time. MIT as well. Maybe we should join forces?