Vox AI Guide for VSCode

Nobody understands the maze. Copilot reads five kinds of instruction file, Claude Code reads another set, they overlap in one place and contradict each other in three. Somewhere in there, a settings file holds an API key.

This extension answers two questions, in plain words, on your own machine:

Is my AI setup costing me more than it should? Are my keys safe?

It explains and it suggests. It never blocks, never sends anything anywhere, and never writes a file you have not seen a preview of.

Why both questions live in one extension

They are the same files.

An oversized CLAUDE.md inflates the context on every single turn — you pay for it again at each message. The same file with an API key in it sends that key to the provider on every single turn. One sweep, one map, two answers.

The two ways a secret escapes

This is the distinction the extension teaches, and the one no conventional secret scanner makes.

The three traps that catch almost everyone:

• the env block in settings.json;
• .vscode/settings.json — version-controlled by default, and it carries claudeCode.environmentVariables;
• the env block of an MCP server in .mcp.json, a file designed to be committed.

And the one nobody thinks about: ~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonl records everything that hit the screen — a cat .env, a printenv, an API response. /clear erases nothing on disk. The command Vox AI: Scan my Claude transcripts for secrets sweeps exactly that.

The value is never displayed

The Finding type does not carry the secret's value. Not in the panel, not in a notification, not in a log — the startup notification announces a count. This is a type-level guarantee, not a discipline: you cannot leak what you do not carry. A panel is a webview; it ends up in a screenshot, in a screen share, or in the context of an agent asked to read it back.

Where the money goes

Both tools now bill per token — Claude always did, and GitHub replaced premium requests with AI Credits on 2026-06-01, billed on input, output and cache. So the answer to "where did my month go" is a measurement, not an estimate. The extension walks your local transcripts and splits the spend three ways:

That split is why the first fix on the list is usually the right one. On the machine this project came from, 86% of the spend sat in the first bucket: built-in subagents inherit the session's model, the session ran on Opus, so 78 searches ran on Opus.

The fixes

Every one of them carries its why — that is the point of the extension, not a UI detail — and every one shows a before/after preview before it touches anything.

Writes to ~/.claude/settings.json create a .bak first.

On a detected secret there are only two actions — Open (the file, at the right line) and Ignore (add to .gitignore). No automatic rewriting: on a file holding a credential, taking the human to the right place beats editing blind. And when the file is already tracked by git, the fix refuses to present itself as sufficient — it points at revocation instead.

What it looks like

An icon in the activity bar opens the summary: keys found, current Claude session, available fixes. A badge shows the number of exposed credentials, or failing that the number of fixes. One idea per screen; the figures are one click deeper, as evidence for the word.

Vox AI: Diagnose my AI configuration opens the full map in an editor tab:

1. Secrets in your config — with, for each, how it escapes: pushed out, or sent to the model.
2. Current Claude session — context size, model, subagents spawned. Read from the local transcript, since Claude Code exposes no API to an extension.
3. Suggested fixes — each with its why.
4. Where your instructions live — the 12 locations across both tools, and for each: who reads it, its scope, whether it exists, and whether it is actually loaded (several depend on a VSCode setting people forget to switch on).
5. Active VSCode settings — the effective value and the layer it comes from, plus the layers it overrides. A workspace setting lives in a version-controlled file.
6. Habits — what no setting will ever do for you.

"Not detected" is a first-class state: a tool you do not have still gets a row, so the sweep looks as complete as it is.

No telemetry. At all.

On a secret detector, the slightest network callback would be credential exfiltration.

• Local reads, displayed to you, on your machine. Zero network egress.
• Nothing is collected, so there is nothing to declare. Centralising this — an OTEL exporter, a team dashboard, per-user Admin API pulls — would put it under GDPR and CBA no. 81: prior collective information, works council consultation, purpose, proportionality.
• Transcripts contain client code and data. Exporting them, even to an internal collector, touches the NDAs.
• If management wants figures, they exist at organisation level: the Anthropic Admin API and the GitHub billing report. Never from a developer's workstation.

Settings

Install

From the Marketplace: search Vox AI Guide in the Extensions view, or

code --install-extension plog.vox-ai-guide

Nothing on your machine is installed through curl | bash. That is a rule here, not a preference.

Develop

npm install
npm run compile          # or: npm run watch

F5 in VSCode launches a test window (see .vscode/launch.json). To package:

npx @vscode/vsce package

Adding a fix

src/fixes.ts is the only file to touch. A fix is { id, title, why, gain, applicable(), preview(), apply() }, and preview() is mandatory — a fix without one would be a fix applied blind.

Only --vscode-* variables are used for colour, so Light and High Contrast work without a second palette. Reference width is 340px, but the sidebar shrinks to ~170px: everything is fluid.

Scope

VSCode, for now. Developers who run claude in a terminal outside VSCode are not covered — for them the same agent files would redistribute as a Claude Code plugin. A port, not a rewrite.

Questions, fixes to add, false positives: open an issue.