Dabbler AI Orchestration
An AI-led coding-session workflow for VS Code. Manage structured AI
sessions, automatic cross-provider verification, cost tracking, and
git-worktree-aware session-set state — all from the activity bar.
What you get
Sessions, not infinite chats. Bounded slices of work — one
session, one orchestrator conversation, one verification, one
commit. Sessions live inside ordered session sets that you and
the AI co-design before any code is written. The activity-bar tree
shows what's in flight, what's queued, and what's done.
Cost-minded routing. Every reasoning task (code review,
analysis, documentation, end-of-session verification) goes through
the AI router, which picks the cheapest capable model per task and
escalates only when needed. Real projects we tested measured
73% savings vs Opus-only on a CLI/library project (990 routed
calls) and 32% savings on a UI app with UAT/E2E gates (370
calls). Two sample reports ship in the
GitHub repo.
Cross-provider verification, every session. Each session ends
with an independent verification by a model from a different
provider than the one that did the work. The verifier returns
structured JSON; disagreements surface for human adjudication
rather than being silently merged or dismissed.
Get started
After install, the Session Set Explorer shows a Get Started
welcome the first time you open a workspace with no
docs/session-sets/ folder. Click Copy adoption bootstrap prompt
and paste it into a fresh AI chat (Claude Code, Gemini Code Assist,
or any GPT-based tool). The AI fetches the canonical setup
instructions and walks you through:
- A budget-threshold dialog — pick a tier (zero, under ~$20,
$20–$99, or $100+) that maps to a verification mode you can
afford.
- A plan alignment — the AI proposes a session-set
decomposition based on what you describe.
- A numbered action checklist — every intended write, config,
and scaffolding step is listed. You batch-approve before anything
touches disk. No per-write confirmation prompts. You can
interrupt at any time.
Once your first session set exists, the welcome content disappears
and the standard activity-bar tree takes over.
If you'd rather drive the setup from VS Code's UI directly, run
Dabbler: Get Started from the command palette
(Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P) for the wizard alternative.
What it'll cost
API spend is real and varies by project size and verification
appetite. Honest framing:
- Zero-budget mode is genuinely free — verification routes
through a different AI assistant you open manually (e.g.
open a second AI chat as the verifier), or you skip verification
with the decision logged in the session's
change-log.md.
- Low-budget mode (under ~$20 over multi-week project life)
uses subscription-based AI assistants for the heavy lifting,
with API verification only at session end.
- High-budget mode ($20+ over project life) uses synchronous
API calls throughout, with full automation.
The router writes one JSON line per call to
ai_router/router-metrics.jsonl so you can audit spend at any
time. The Cost Dashboard command surfaces cumulative spend
visually; python -m ai_router.report produces a full markdown
manager-report with the Opus-baseline savings headline,
per-task-type unreliability rates, and auto-generated action
items. The framework is open-source (MIT) — your costs are entirely
your provider's API spend; nothing in this extension is paywalled.
Requirements
- VS Code 1.85+
- Python 3.10+ with a workspace
.venv/ (the
Dabbler: Install ai-router command auto-detects or creates
it for you)
- API keys as environment variables:
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (Claude Sonnet, Opus)GEMINI_API_KEY (Gemini Flash, Pro)OPENAI_API_KEY (GPT-5.4, GPT-5.4 Mini)- All three are required so cross-provider verification has
somewhere to route to.
- One orchestrator AI agent installed as a VS Code extension
(Claude Code, Codex/GitHub Copilot, or Gemini Code Assist — the
framework is agent-agnostic and supports switching mid-set).
Optional: PUSHOVER_API_KEY + PUSHOVER_USER_KEY for
end-of-session phone notifications.
Sign-up links and a full prerequisites checklist live in the
GitHub repo's README.
Other features
- Activity-bar views for Provider Queues and Provider Heartbeats
— observe outsource-last work in flight and per-provider activity
at a glance.
- Cancel/Restore lifecycle — cancel a session set mid-stream
with a recorded reason; restore later if priorities shift. The
audit trail accumulates across cycles.
- UAT checklist editor integration — for sets that opt in with
requiresUAT: true, the orchestrator authors a checklist that
pairs with the freely-available
UAT checklist editor.
Pending review blocks downstream sessions unless explicitly
overridden.
- Worktree auto-discovery — parallel session sets running in
sibling git worktrees show up in the activity-bar tree even when
the worktree isn't open as a separate workspace folder.
Learn more
License
MIT. Copyright © 2026 darndestdabbler.
