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 dialog — set a not-to-exceed (NTE) dollar cap for
verification spend. Verification calls typically cost $0.05–$0.80
each; entering $0 switches to manual cross-provider review at
no API cost.
- 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). The wizard includes a
Configure AI Router button that opens the visual config editor
once your project is set up.
What it'll cost
API spend is real and varies by project size and verification
appetite. Honest framing:
- $0 budget — 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. No
API spend.
- Non-zero budget — the router makes synchronous API calls for
cross-provider verification, capped at your not-to-exceed (NTE)
threshold. Verification calls typically run $0.05–$0.80 each;
a 3-session set usually totals $0.15–$2.50; a 6-session set
$0.30–$5.00. These are empirical medians — outliers exist.
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
- Visual config editor (
Dabbler: Open Dabbler Config Editor) —
edit router-config.yaml, budget.yaml, and the gitignored
local-overrides.yaml through a six-section panel without touching
YAML directly. Sections cover routing mode, budget threshold,
provider API-key env vars, significance flagging, Pushover
notifications, and a local-overrides summary. Includes a
live-validation drift banner and a "Send a test notification" button.
- Significance flagging —
Dabbler: Flag Decision for Cross-Provider Review appends a one-line reason to the active set's review queue.
Dabbler: Scan Workspace for @dabbler:outsource-review Annotations
walks source files for # @dabbler:outsource-review("...") and
// @dabbler:outsource-review("...") annotations and queues new
findings automatically.
- 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.
| |
