[FEATURE] Include notebook cell ID in IDE selection context for Jupyter notebooks

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Apr 10, 2026 by RafaAvilaMartinez-Etsy Closed May 22, 2026

Preflight Checklist

  • [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
  • [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

When working with Jupyter notebooks in VS Code, the ide_selection context provides the selected code content and line numbers, but does not include the notebook cell_id. Since the NotebookEdit tool requires a cell_id to target a specific cell, Claude must read the entire notebook file or run a script to match the selected content against cells and find the corresponding ID before making any edit.

This adds unnecessary overhead to every notebook edit operation that originates from a user selection.

Proposed Solution

Include the cell_id (and optionally cell_type) in the ide_selection context when the selection comes from a Jupyter notebook cell. For example:

<ide_selection cell_id="76f7be6b" cell_type="code">
The user selected lines 3 to 5 from /path/to/notebook.ipynb:
x = symbols('x')
f = 2*x + 1
plot(f)
</ide_selection>

This would allow Claude to directly use NotebookEdit with the correct cell_id without any file reading or lookup step.

Alternatives Considered

  • Read the full notebook file to find the cell ID by matching content — works but is slow and wasteful, especially for large notebooks.
  • Run a Python script to search for the cell ID — lighter, but still an extra step for every edit.

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