ContextZero

One place to see and manage what every AI coding agent knows — across all your projects.

A VS Code extension that gives you one sidebar, split into Context, Prompts, and Templates panels, for the memory, rules, and skills used by Claude Code, Cursor, Kiro, Antigravity, and the shared AGENTS.md standard, for every project on your machine — including monorepos, where sub-projects nest under their parent — plus safe recovery of Claude Code memory and chat history when you rename or move a project folder.

Built by Tahir Nazir — its-tahir.com

Why this exists

If you use more than one AI coding tool, each one keeps its own rules, memory, and knowledge files — scattered across your home directory and every project folder, with no shared view. There's no single place to see what Claude Code, Cursor, Kiro, Antigravity, and the tool-neutral AGENTS.md standard each know about a project, or what your global rules say for each of them.

Claude Code adds a second, separate problem on top of that: it stores per-project data under ~/.claude/projects/<slug>/, where the slug is derived from your project folder's path. Rename or move a project folder and Claude starts fresh — your chat history and memory sit orphaned under the old slug.

ContextZero solves both. It gives you one project-first sidebar tree spanning all five tools — nesting monorepo sub-projects under their parent — and — specific to Claude Code — it can safely relink a renamed project and recover its memory and chat history, all under a strict safety model: it never deletes or overwrites a single file. It also ships a library of reusable prompts and rule/skill templates you can copy or apply to any project, and a per-project readiness check.

Features

Orphan detection and relink are currently Windows-only — Claude Code's project-folder encoding is decoded for Windows paths.

Library

Two extra panels under the ContextZero icon:

• Prompts — built-in starter prompts (onboard a codebase, systematic debug, new-feature kickoff, write tests, code review) plus your own. Click the copy button to put a prompt on the clipboard, ready to paste into any agent. Copy to My Library forks a built-in into ~/.contextzero/prompts/ so you can customise it.
• Templates — rule templates (Frontend, Backend, Code quality) and a skill template (Systematic debugging). Apply to Project… writes the rules into a project as AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md, or CLAUDE.md (never overwriting), or for a skill template, asks where to install it (Antigravity or Claude Code, project or global — the same destination picker as Install Skill…).

Your custom prompts and templates live in ~/.contextzero/ as plain Markdown.

Each project in the Context panel also shows a Readiness line — which of CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md, and memory it has — with a one-click + to create most missing files (GEMINI.md is shown for awareness only).

Team library sources

Point ContextZero at libraries your whole team shares:

Add Library Source… on the Templates panel clones a repo (shallow, and narrowed to the library folders). Big catalogs — such as agentic-awesome-skills with ~1,969 skills — appear as one row grouped A–Z, and descriptions are read only when you expand a letter.

If a clone or pull fails (no git, a private repo, a timeout, no network), the source still appears in the tree with a ⚠ not downloaded — use Update row instead of silently vanishing — retry with its Update Source button once the problem is fixed. Right-click a git source for Remove Library Source… to drop it from contextZero.librarySources and delete its managed clone.

ContextZero: Search Skills searches skill names and descriptions — descriptions become searchable once that source's index has finished building in the background after a clone or pull — across every source. It does not search prompts or rule templates.

Install Skill… copies a whole skill folder (its SKILL.md plus any scripts/, examples/) into:

Files that already exist are skipped and reported, never overwritten — there is no confirmation dialog for this one; it goes straight to a destination picker.

Skills come from library sources you or your team point ContextZero at — often third-party repos — and may include scripts/. Installing a skill places that content where your agent can read and run it, same as any file in your project. Only add sources you trust.

Bootstrap Project… on a project applies a team standard defined in a bootstrap.json inside any library source, so the standard is versioned with your team's library:

{ "profiles": [ { "name": "Backend service",
  "rules": [{ "template": "backend", "target": "AGENTS.md" }],
  "skills": ["systematic-debugging"] } ] }

ContextZero manages ~/.contextzero/sources/ (clones and the search index) and may delete or re-create what's under it. See Safety model for the full boundary.

Providers

Tools you don't use never appear in the tree.

Verification status: Claude Code and Cursor layouts are verified against real installations. Kiro and Antigravity's knowledge directory are implemented from documented layouts and are not yet confirmed against a populated install. Antigravity's GEMINI.md project context file was found on a real install and is listed alongside .antigravityrules.

Settings

Safety model

• Never deletes or overwrites your files. The strongest operation on your own files is renaming a folder to *.backup-<timestamp> (Claude Code relink only). Existing files are always left alone: copy-memory and template conflicts get a -migrated suffix, while skill installs and bootstrap simply skip any file that's already there and report it.
• ~/.contextzero/sources/ is a managed cache, not your files. It holds ContextZero's own clones of git library sources and their search index. ContextZero may delete or re-create anything under it — to recover from a partial clone, or when you use Remove Library Source… — but this is the only location it will ever delete from; nothing outside it is touched.
• Runs git and makes network requests. v0.5 shells out to git to clone and pull library sources (shallow, --filter=blob:none, sparse to the library folders) — daily in the background by default, disable with contextZero.autoUpdateSources: false. Git is only ever invoked with argument arrays (never a shell string), URLs are validated first, credential prompts are disabled outright so a private repo fails instead of hanging, and every invocation is bounded by a timeout.
• Sensitive and binary files invisible. .credentials.json, *.db, *.pb, *.pbtxt, and lock files never appear in the tree or search for any tool, and are never read.
• Confirmation where it matters. Cloning or removing a library source, and Claude Code relink/copy-memory, show a modal dialog first. Install Skill… and Apply to Project… don't confirm — they show a destination picker and skip files that already exist, so there's nothing destructive to confirm.
• Auditable. Every write is logged to the ContextZero output channel (View → Output → ContextZero).

Installation

This extension is installed from a local .vsix file (it is not on the marketplace).

cd d:\dev\ai\memory-manager
npm install          # first time only
npm run package      # builds context-zero-0.1.0.vsix
code --install-extension context-zero-0.1.0.vsix

Then reload VS Code (Ctrl+Shift+P → Developer: Reload Window). The brain icon appears in the activity bar.

Alternative without the command line: Ctrl+Shift+P → Extensions: Install from VSIX… → pick the .vsix file.

Updating after you change the code

A locally installed .vsix does not auto-update. After editing the source:

npm run compile      # check it builds
npm test             # run the unit tests
npm run package      # rebuild the .vsix
code --install-extension context-zero-0.1.0.vsix   # reinstalls over the old one

Then reload the VS Code window. Tip: bump "version" in package.json when you make real changes, so you can tell which build is installed (code --list-extensions --show-versions).

For development you don't need to install at all: open this folder in VS Code and press F5 — an Extension Development Host window launches with the extension loaded straight from source.

Development

npm run compile      # TypeScript build → out/
npm run watch        # rebuild on save
npm test             # unit tests (vitest) — never touch your real tool homes
npm run test:vscode  # integration smoke test against a fixture home

The tests run against temp directories and a fixture home directory (CONTEXTZERO_HOME override) — your real data is never involved.

Changelog

0.1.0

First public release: one sidebar for Claude Code, Cursor, Kiro, Antigravity and AGENTS.md; monorepo nesting; per-project readiness; a prompt and template library; team library sources with A–Z browsing, search and skill installation; project bootstrap; and Claude Code relink/recovery. See CHANGELOG.md for detail.

License

MIT

_{TN. — crafted by Tahir Nazir · its-tahir.com}