SideChick 🐣

The coding challenge sidekick that shows up while your AI does the work.

You're using Copilot. Cursor. Claude Code. They're writing code faster than you ever could — and that's fine. SideChick isn't here to stop that.

It's here to make sure you don't go soft in the process.

While your AI generates, refactors, and autocompletes — SideChick quietly drops a challenge on the side. A DSA problem. A broken MERN app to debug. Nothing that blocks your flow. Just a little something to keep the fundamentals alive while the machines do the heavy lifting.

Think of it as the gym you go to because you know sitting at a desk all day is doing something to your body. Except the desk is your IDE and the gym is a busted Express middleware that needs fixing.

Why "SideChick"?

It's never the main event. Your AI is. Your code is. Your deadlines are.

SideChick just lives on the side — always there, always ready with a challenge — making sure that when the AI scaffolding eventually falls away, you still know what you're doing.

How It Works

When SideChick detects a significant AI-assisted insertion in your editor, it surfaces a challenge alongside your work:

DSA mode — a LeetCode-style problem solved right inside VS Code. Monaco editor, live verdict, no tab switching.

Dev mode — a broken MERN project spawns in a new workspace. Tests are failing. You know what to do.

Solve it, earn the streak point, move on. Your AI was never going anywhere.

Streaks & Leaderboards

Sign in with GitHub and every challenge you clear builds your streak and total solve count — synced live to a leaderboard your whole team can see. Leaderboard Link Find out who's been growing alongside their AI and who's been purely vibing.

Anonymous mode available for the self-aware but commitment-averse.

Get It

Search SideChick on the VS Code Marketplace.

Set sidechick.mode to dsa, dev, or random and let it run in the background.

Your AI keeps working. You keep growing. That's the whole idea.