Collaborative computational notebooks with AI research agents

Built at Humans& Product Hackathon

Research is inherently collaborative, but the tools aren't. Computational notebooks today are single-player experiences — one person writing code, reading papers, and validating results alone. Scaling a research workflow means hiring more people and waiting for them to get up to speed.

Parallel turns your notebook into a multiplayer research environment where AI agents work alongside you as specialized team members. You set a hypothesis, and your team gets to work:

• Engineer — designs experiments, writes reproducible code, and executes it in sandboxed environments
• Researcher — searches arXiv and the web for relevant literature, surfacing papers and prior work
• Reviewer — pokes holes in your methodology, identifies biases, and flags statistical issues

Agents contribute findings directly into your notebook in real-time. You stay in control — review their work, run their code, and iterate together.

• Real-time collaboration — multiple users editing the same notebook simultaneously via Yjs
• AI agent roles — spawn Engineer, Researcher, or Reviewer agents scoped to your workspace
• Live code execution — run Python in isolated containers with GPU support (T4 through H200)
• Research tools — agents can search arXiv, browse the web, and execute code autonomously
• Rich output — inline plots, dataframes, images, and LaTeX math rendering
• Activity streams — watch agents think, plan, and contribute in real-time

apps/
  web/          → Next.js frontend, Convex backend
  agents/       → Cloudflare Durable Objects for persistent agent state
  sync/         → Yjs WebSocket sync server (Hono + PartyServer)
  sandboxes/    → Python execution containers (FastAPI + Modal for GPU)

packages/
  agent-kit/       → Core agent types and tool implementations
  agent-kit-react/ → React hooks for agent streaming and chat
  ui/              → Shared component library

# Install dependencies
bun install

# Run all services in dev mode
turbo dev

Individual services:

turbo dev --filter=web        # Next.js app (port 3000)
turbo dev --filter=agents     # Agent server
turbo dev --filter=sync       # Sync server (port 8383)

Built solo in 8 hours at the Humans& Product Hackathon.