Rao is an AI research assistant built for computational science, from Tuva AI. It lives inside VS Code alongside your notebooks, papers, and data — and helps you read, write, and reason across all of them.
What it does
Chat with your project. Ask questions grounded in your notebooks, code, and the PDFs in your workspace. Citations link back to the exact cell or page.
Read papers faster. Index a folder of PDFs and Rao builds a searchable knowledge base, so you can ask "what does the Feynman paper say about X" instead of hunting through tabs.
Work in notebooks. Tag cells, send outputs, errors, or figures straight to chat, and get help debugging or extending your analysis without leaving the notebook.
Use your own tools. Rao exposes its retrieval and project context as MCP tools, so Claude Code, Codex, and other MCP-aware agents can use the same knowledge base.
Recall over your own thinking. Rao learns what you're working on, how your ideas are related, and the state of your work. Use Rao's project memory features to organize your thinking.
Getting started
Install the extension and open the Tuva sidebar (or Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+T).
Open a folder — run Rao: Index Workspace from the command palette to build the knowledge index.
