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.

letting the agent build its own panes is a neat idea. do people keep the layouts it creates?

Sounds cool, can you explain a bit more how it works?

In my opinion it can be more usefol if I can add it with an mcp server, so I can use with my agent and test it in real workflows to see if it can add power and some prons to my agent