Positron Notebooks: Cell-level Assistant actions

[seeM]

Let's provide ways for users to invoke Assistant within the scope of an individual cell (keeping in mind that the chat pane would be more geared to entire notebook document changes).

There should be a mix of hard coded actions like:

• Explain the contents (or outputs) of a cell.

Dynamic actions based on the contents of the cell like:

• Transform a cell e.g. change a bar plot to a line plot.
• convert plot to a shiny app
• parameterize this cell
• extract to function
• consolidate imports

We should not overload the user with too many recommendations. We may want to set a limit of 5 recommendations shown at a time

Note that we don't need to be constrained by existing cell UI contribution points for this.

See wip mocks on figma

[rodrigosf672]

@nstrayer @seeM Just wanted to confirm that, right now, we do not expect the Assistant to work with cell outputs, correct?

I ask because, currently, adding cell to chat leads to the following error. Is this expected? Thanks!

Positron Version: 2025.07.0 build 69
Code - OSS Version: 1.100.0
Commit: 4c31a7607d0322d4b106a1c8ce475ae30bb6448b
Date: 2025-06-09T14:47:42.722Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

[seeM]

@rodrigosf672 Good catch, let's open a new issue for that

[cindyytong]

TODO does this overlap with existing tickets in epic https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/10128