posit-dev / posit-dev/positron
Epic: 2026.10 Providers and Auth
@sharon-wang is already working on this.
Since Sep 3, 2026.
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Description
High-level goals
- less duplicative efforts when supporting a new provider, or when adding enhancements/fixes for an existing provider, across:
- auth layer
- LLM comms layer
- UI layer
- provider availability and authentication support consistency and alignment across Posit Assistant clients
- shift auth ownership from Positron to Posit Assistant, so that it's owned by the agent harness
Spike 1: shared credential & auth architecture
Where the "one owner" of auth logic lives, and the reusable auth-method abstraction it needs to support, so headless features (notebooks, Posit AI NES, git commit messages) don't need full Posit Assistant dependency the way chat does today, and we can consolidate the bulk of the auth handling in a single place.
What we hope will be alleviated by the architectural direction from this spike
- inherit provider support from assistant
- headless lm service provider support consistent with assistant
- centralize and make consistent auth handling for various configurations
Spike 2: non-AI providers & shared credentials
Related to Spike 1, but to review the credential situation for Connections and how the shared credentials direction of Spike 1 for AI providers affects credential sharing for Connections. Pertains only to Connections-relevant providers like Snowflake, Databricks, etc.
For 2026.10, our goal is: for creds to automatically take for both Connections and AI Providers, then Workbench Managed Credentials is the solution (for Snowflake, Databricks, Foundry, AWS), and equivalent support for Desktop is available if you set creds via environment variables.
The Connections workstream will also be exploring support for Workbench Managed Credentials in 2026.10.
What we hope will be alleviated by the architectural direction from this spike
- https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/15436
- Other Connections-related providers like Snowflake have a path forward for Auth
Spike 3: provider configuration UI
This spike is focused on the UI aspect of authentication. Currently, Positron has its own providers modal, and Posit Assistant also has its own for standalone/RStudio.
What we hope will be alleviated by the architectural direction from this spike
- All the same issues as Spike 1, but from the UI side of things
- https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/15559
- Review feedback in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LaayhG6uy3FuwmjRepbSQhOInPZ_-KIaRYtLRiGenxE/edit?tab=t.nygfsh0qnjh for any further UI revamp considerations
Spike 4: AWS Kiro support
There was a customer request to support AWS Kiro as a model provider rather than directly interfacing with AWS Bedrock. Primarily of interest because of easier/different authentication model rather than AWS Bedrock. Let's do a limited (less than 1 hr) investigation on how we might support this (in Posit Assistant ideally, given Spike 1).
Other
Not directly nested under any spike.
- https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/14709
- https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/15546
- https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/15672
- https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/15292 (before we take this, need to confirm it's an ordering bug purely in Posit Assistant that is worth fixing, rather than something that should be resolved with the spike work)
- Docs audit: positron.posit.co and assistant.posit.co in alignment? Anything to update?
- Get to a better place re: access to the various provider creds/accounts for dev and testing
- Provider testing audit: what other CI tests/infra would be good to have, and how might this evolve as we shift around the auth architecture? https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/14947
- TBD if still needed: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/15023
- stretch goal: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/14863 we can implement our best guess, but we can’t test this unless we have access to a real GitHub Enterprise account
Issues to defer until after re-architecting/spikes
At present, these generally involve making changes in ai-lib/Assistant that we would currently need to duplicate efforts for in Positron.
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