NBI 4.7.0 — Cell output actions, agent toolbar, Claude launcher tile

NBI 4.7.0 is a feature-dense release. The headline is cell output actions: right-click any output to send it to the chat as structured context. Image attachments, streaming inline chat, and a Claude Code launcher tile all land alongside.

Cell output actions

Right-click a cell output — or hover for the new toolbar — to open the chat sidebar with the output already attached as context. Three actions ship:

  • Explain — “what is this output telling me?”
  • Ask — open a chat with the output attached, ready for whatever follow-up you want.
  • Troubleshoot — for stack traces, error messages, or unexpected results.

Outputs forward as structured MIME bundles, including images for vision-capable models. The attachment is token-bounded so a large output doesn’t overflow the context window.

Per-user toggles live in config.json (enable_explain_error, enable_output_followup, enable_output_toolbar, all default on). Admins can lock the feature via NBI_EXPLAIN_ERROR_POLICY, NBI_OUTPUT_FOLLOWUP_POLICY, and NBI_OUTPUT_TOOLBAR_POLICY.

Image attachments in chat

Paste or attach images alongside a prompt. When the active model is vision-capable (Claude with vision enabled, GPT-4o, Gemini, etc.), the image is forwarded as model input — useful for screenshots, plots, and architecture diagrams.

Streaming inline chat

The inline chat popover (Cmd+I / Ctrl+I) now streams tokens as they arrive instead of waiting for the full response. Long answers feel responsive instead of stalled.

Notebook-scoped generation

A sparkle icon on the active notebook’s toolbar opens a popover that scopes the generation to that notebook specifically. Useful when you have multiple notebooks open and want the agent to focus on the one in front.

Claude Code launcher tile

A Claude Code tile in the JupyterLab launcher opens a session picker: resume an existing transcript or start a new one in the file browser’s active subdirectory. Session IDs are copyable from the picker for sharing or for use with the claude CLI directly.

Repo-level AGENTS.md

When a project root contains an AGENTS.md file, NBI appends its contents under the system prompt’s “Additional Guidelines” section, alongside the existing ruleset injection. Useful for monorepos that already keep agent instructions there.

Claude WebSocket heartbeat

Long-running Claude agent requests now stay alive through upstream proxy and load-balancer idle timeouts (JupyterHub’s nginx defaults to 60s) by sending a status heartbeat every 20s while a request is in flight. Fixes Bedrock-style request failures where processing exceeded the proxy idle window.

Extended admin policy coverage

Every Settings panel toggle is now lockable via an environment variable. New boolean policies:

  • NBI_CLAUDE_MODE_POLICY
  • NBI_CLAUDE_CONTINUE_CONVERSATION_POLICY
  • NBI_CLAUDE_CODE_TOOLS_POLICY
  • NBI_CLAUDE_JUPYTER_UI_TOOLS_POLICY
  • NBI_CLAUDE_SETTING_SOURCE_USER_POLICY
  • NBI_CLAUDE_SETTING_SOURCE_PROJECT_POLICY
  • NBI_STORE_GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN_POLICY

New value-presence locks (set the env var to a value to pin it; the UI control becomes read-only):

  • NBI_CHAT_MODEL_PROVIDER, NBI_CHAT_MODEL_ID
  • NBI_INLINE_COMPLETION_MODEL_PROVIDER, NBI_INLINE_COMPLETION_MODEL_ID
  • NBI_CLAUDE_CHAT_MODEL, NBI_CLAUDE_INLINE_COMPLETION_MODEL
  • ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL

The /claude-sessions HTTP route also accepts ?scope=cwd to filter to sessions whose recorded cwd matches the lab’s working directory.

Full env-var reference: docs/admin-guide.md.

Internal

  • Claude agent connection now happens in the background so JupyterLab finishes loading without waiting on the SDK handshake.
  • CI now runs pytest tests/ and jlpm test on every PR. Both build jobs declare permissions: { contents: read } so a compromised step can’t push.

Notable fixes

  • API hygiene in notebook_intelligence.api: raise NotImplemented (which raised TypeError) is now raise NotImplementedError; five shared-default-argument cases were corrected; Signal.disconnect tolerates double-disconnect with a debug-level log; registrar methods raise a new RegistrationError instead of silently logging.
  • Claude headers (model + version) now sent on inline completion calls, matching the chat path.
  • OpenAI-compatible provider drops the unsupported tool.strict flag when targeting vLLM (#108).
  • Symlink-aware session lookup — resolves symlinks when locating Claude session transcripts, so ~/.claude/projects/ symlinked off another volume keeps working.
  • Claude worker thread no longer crashes on cancellation.
  • “Generating…” row no longer reflows the chat sidebar on narrow widths.
  • Skills popup in the chat sidebar dismisses on click-outside or when the input is cleared.
  • Spurious “Skills reloaded” notification at Claude-session launch is gone — the watcher now keys off a structural signature of bundle dirs plus SKILL.md mtimes.

Install

pip install --upgrade notebook-intelligence

Then restart JupyterLab. Full changes in the CHANGELOG.