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.
Look into openrouter so you aren’t tied to just Claude or codex