Atomic Reps for VS Code

Why this exists

You approve more code than you write. Most of it is correct, and that is the part that makes this hard: when the code works, nothing makes you understand it, and nothing tells you that you haven't.

The gap turns up later and never at a good moment. In a review, where you cannot say why the change is safe. In an incident, where the thing that is down is the thing you shipped in March. In a question from someone junior about a file with your name on it.

Reading the file again feels like understanding. Answering something about it without the file open is the part that tells you the truth.

So this asks you. You build something and it lands. A question about that work appears in the panel beside your terminal: four options, one key. You answer, you see why, and it gets out of the way.

What it asks about

It asks about what you just touched, not a card from a deck someone else shuffled. Which files changed is worked out on your own machine, from your own repository.

The questions are written and reviewed before they reach you. None of them are made up on the spot, which is the failure people expect from this kind of tool and the one that wastes an afternoon.

They are meant to look obvious. The second of thought before you press a letter is the whole product. Getting one wrong costs nothing and is where most of the explanation lives.

When it asks

• A commit, whether you made it in the editor, in a terminal, or through an agent.
• A push.
• A test or build task that finished without errors.
• A terminal command matching the list in your settings, such as pnpm test or cargo build. This one needs your terminal's shell integration.
• Coming back to the editor after a break, ten minutes by default.
• A debug session ending, which is off by default.
• You asking, with cmd+alt+r on a Mac or ctrl+alt+r elsewhere.

It never watches your typing and it never watches your saves. Saving happens in the middle of a thought, which is the worst moment to ask anybody anything.

How often a rep may come is a setting, from off through to every time you finish a task, with a daily cap and a minimum gap. Every moment above can be switched off on its own.

Atomic Reps: How the moments land shows what it noticed and what you did about it, as a table, so you can decide whether this suits you before you commit to it. Nothing in that table leaves your machine.

The four screens

The panel has a strip across the top.

• Rep. The question, or the welcome when nothing is waiting.
• Me. Your summary, your skills with the accuracy behind each one, your last reps, a twelve week grid of the days you practised, and your mutes.
• Settings. Pace, whether a rep asks how sure you were, which areas and topics a rep may come from, how far the questions reach, and mutes. Each control saves as you change it and the server says what it did.
• Doctor. What this machine believes: the server it talks to, when the next rep is due, the last thing that failed, and a button that checks the server.

Where it shows up

• The panel. A tab beside the terminal. It never steals focus, and its tab carries a badge while a question is waiting.
• The status bar. Your streak at rest, a bell and the topic while a question waits, and the verdict for ten minutes after you answer.
• A notification. Only when the panel is closed, and by default only after a commit or a push. Answer opens the panel, Later keeps it quiet for half an hour. Set atomicreps.toast to never and the status bar carries it alone.

Commands

Editor settings

Pace, topics, levels and mutes belong to your account and live on the Preferences screen. What the editor itself owns is here:

Connect

Run Atomic Reps: Connect this editor. A browser tab opens, a short code is already on your clipboard, you paste it and approve. Connecting sends this computer's name, as the label for this editor, and nothing else about it.

That is the same sign in as npx atomicreps, and the same account: one login serves the command line tool, the MCP server, the Claude Code hook and this extension. A question served here is the same question you answer in Claude Code, and the other way round.

Atomic Reps: Sign out on this machine removes the token and the reps this machine remembers.

Your code and your data

No telemetry. Nothing is measured about how you use the editor and nothing is sent anywhere for analytics.

Your source code is not uploaded. The extension reads which files changed, the packages in your manifest and the file extensions involved, and turns them into short topic keys such as react or migrations. Those keys are what the server receives. The diff itself never leaves your machine.

The extension talks to atomicreps.com and to nothing else, over the same few calls the command line tool makes: ask for a question, send an answer, change a setting.

Your token is stored in ~/.config/atomicreps/config.json at mode 0600, inside a directory at mode 0700, shared with the command line tool. The moments log stays in the editor's own storage on this machine.

Privacy · Security · Data Processing Agreement · Terms

Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium

The same package is published to Open VSX, which those editors read. Search for Atomic Reps there, or install the .vsix by hand.

More

The extension's own page, with the panel you can try in the browser: atomicreps.com/vscode.

Fonts

Satoshi and General Sans by Fontshare, under the Fontshare Free Font Licence. JetBrains Mono by JetBrains, under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1.