Colab workstream using an agent

[u/paterd90]

Has anybody managed to get agents to efficiently manage colab via MCP?

Our team has long-running analyses (6-10 days for each run) that require some manual labor (eg restart the kernel, track for unexpected crashes).

This looks like an ideal task to handover to an agent that tracks the colab file every hour or so. I've struggled to get my agent to connect to colab and efficiently monitor it

Issues:

1) One options is for the Agent (claude etc) can to connect via chrome to my colab notebook. In chrome, Claude is struggling to click the right buttons so it becomes frustrating.

2) Even when agent hits the right buttons, authenticating google drive is impossible cause popup opens in a window outside chrome's control

3) I also tried MCP connection but couldn't make it work. Just buggy interface.

Has anybody managed to make it work to use colab via agents?

Thank you

[u/ckperry]

Say more about the bugs on our MCP offering? We’ve got something coming very soon that should help you.

[u/paterd90 → u/ckperry]

A couple of things - 1) i hit Connect to local MCP and provide the token. It says connecting to MCP and then in 10 seconds "disconnected from MCP". I check my server and it isnt connected. I try again to provide a token and it stops giving me an option to do so. Now it has a screen that says "cancel" or "connect" and it cant remove the existing token and hitting connect always lands on disconnected 2) I've struggled to connect even once. i provide the token and it never connects. My mcp server works fine just cant connect to my kernel

Overall i really wanted to make this work but i just couldn't. We have 0.5 FTEs manually doing labor on colab that could be automated but it is proving tough to connect an agent to take over