ByteAsk for VS Code

Drive the ByteAsk C/C++ agentic coding harness from VS Code.

💬 Join the community

discord.gg/vx5Eu4YNzG — community support, direct access to the team, and the fastest way to report an issue or ask a question. Direct email: anirudha@byteask.ai.

Chat (primary)

The ByteAsk icon in the Activity Bar opens a graphical chat panel — the intended default way to use the extension in VS Code or Cursor. Type a message, watch the response stream in, and approve or decline proposed file changes and commands with inline cards (no terminal, no diff-scraping). It talks to byteask app-server directly (JSON-RPC over stdio), not the CLI-subcommand path below.

Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+B opens/focuses the chat (Command Palette: ByteAsk: Open Chat).

Current v1 scope: one thread per workspace session, streaming text + collapsed "Thinking" blocks, and Accept/Decline approval cards (file changes show a "View diff" link that opens a read-only syntax-highlighted unified diff). Session history/resume and a model switcher aren't in the chat panel yet — use the terminal-based commands below for those in the meantime.

Terminal-based commands (still available)

ByteAsk: Open Terminal — the interactive TUI in an integrated terminal.
Exec / Exec on Selection — headless byteask exec; selection is sent as context.
Fix Diagnostics in Active File — pipe the file's problems into exec for a fix.
Review Repository — byteask review, streamed to the ByteAsk output channel.
Apply Latest Diff — byteask apply to write the agent's diff to your tree.
Resume / Resume Last — pick up a previous session.

Requirements

pip install --upgrade byteask   # or: pipx install byteask
byteask login
byteask doctor

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
`byteask.command`	`byteask`	Path to the CLI executable
`byteask.model`	`""`	Model passed via `-m` (empty = default)
`byteask.extraArgs`	`[]`	Extra CLI args (e.g. `["--oss"]`)
`byteask.autoApply`	`false`	Run `byteask apply` after a successful exec

Keybindings

Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+B — open/focus the ByteAsk chat panel
Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+E — exec on the current selection

(byteask.open, the terminal command, has no default keybinding anymore — it's still reachable via the Command Palette as ByteAsk: Open Terminal.)

Develop

npm install
npm run compile      # → out/extension.js
# Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host
npm run package      # build a .vsix (requires @vscode/vsce)

Headless commands stream via child_process into the ByteAsk output channel; the interactive TUI runs in an integrated terminal (it needs a TTY). The chat panel is the newer path: src/appServer/ is a small JSON-RPC client over byteask app-server's stdio protocol; src/appServer/generated/ is vendored, type-only TypeScript produced by byteask app-server generate-ts --experimental (regenerate it if the protocol changes — do not hand-edit those files). Both paths coexist; nothing about the terminal/exec path changed.

License

Apache-2.0