Tiny Owl Kit — VS Code Extension

See your Tiny Owl Kit project's errors, warnings, and recent events right in the editor, without leaving VS Code.

Getting started

1. Install Tiny Owl Kit from the VS Code Marketplace or Open VSX.
2. In Tiny Owl Kit, open Project → Security & API Keys → VS Code / Editor Access → Create read key. Only the project owner can do this, and the key is shown once.
3. In VS Code, run Tiny Owl: Add Project and paste the project id and the read key. The key is verified against the backend before it is stored.
4. Optional: enable "Show event context in VS Code" on the same page. It is off by default.

Self-hosted backend? Read keys require READ_KEY_ENABLED=true on the backend.

Features

• Status bar — live error/warning counts for the active project over the selected time window, with a throttled spike notification and key-expiry warnings. Clicking it opens the in-editor workbench, never the browser.
• Startup — the extension activates when VS Code finishes starting and fetches the active project once in the background, so the status bar and sidebar are populated without opening the workbench. The default window is the last 24 hours (older events are not shown); change it from the Workbench dropdown or Tiny Owl: Change Time Window.
• Sidebar view — a dedicated "Tiny Owl Kit" activity-bar container with a "Recent Events" tree. Primary actions live in the view toolbar (and the ⋯ overflow menu); you do not need the Command Palette for day-to-day use. Clicking an event reveals it in the workbench's Logs tab.
• In-editor workbench (Tiny Owl: Show Dashboard) — a hardened, strict-CSP master-detail panel: a Monitor tab (severity counts, error rate, severity mix, error-spike indicator), a Logs tab (filterable/searchable event list
  • a detail pane with message/severity/timestamp/trace id), and a Traces tab that reconstructs a traceId's end-to-end flow as an oldest-first timeline (e.g. a checkout: cart.created → payment.authorized → order.confirmed, or the exact step that failed) — reachable via "View flow" on any event that has a trace id, or by pasting one directly. context/ requestMeta only appear when the project owner opted in server-side, and stay hidden behind a per-field "Reveal" even then. The browser only opens via the explicit "Open in Web ↗" action.
• Copy for AI — turns an event into a redacted, prompt-ready Markdown block. For context-enabled projects it includes the redacted context by default; IP/user-agent (requestMeta) is never included unless you explicitly tick "include IP/user-agent (PII)" for that copy. Prefer the leanest possible clipboard content? Tiny Owl: Copy for AI (summary only) always omits context.

Sidebar controls

Open the owl icon in the activity bar → Recent Events. The view title bar exposes:

The view ⋯ menu also has Open Web Dashboard, Remove Project, and Open Settings (poll interval, dashboard base URL). Command Palette entries remain available under the Tiny Owl category.

Commands

"Open in Web Dashboard" (event context menu) deep-links to that specific event/trace in the browser — the only path that leaves the editor for a single event.

Security

• Read keys are stored only in VS Code's SecretStorage (OS keychain) — never in settings, workspaceState, or logs.
• Read keys are read-only and project-scoped; they cannot write events or access any other project.
• All API responses are treated as untrusted display data.
• See SECURITY.md for the full threat model, including how context/requestMeta rendering and Copy-for-AI are contained, and how to report a vulnerability.
• The master list is fully keyboard-navigable (Tab between rows, Enter/Space to open the detail pane).

Contributing

Development, CI and release notes live in CONTRIBUTING.md.