Webcogs VSCode extension

Part of the Webcogs open source experimental AI software engineering toolkit. The extension provides a CodeLens alternative for the buildcogsinplace command line tool.

Features

Provides methodical prompts-as-code facilities that are complementary to the ad hoc prompting offered by most code generating AI tools. Instead of prompting in a chat line, then throwing away the prompts once the code is generated, prompts can be embedded in the source code.

• Put prompts directly in your source code inside comments and generate functions in place.

• Define context via file-wide system prompts and include external files in your prompts.

• Easily mix fully AI generated code with hand-crafted code in a single source file.

• Compatible with languages that use C-style multiline comments /* ... */

How to use

You have to activate the codelens from the command palette. Type Shift-Ctrl-P, then select "Webcogs: Enable Webcogs Codelens".

You need to have an OpenAI API key, which you are prompted to fill in when the plugin initialises. If you have to re-enter it, use the command "Webcogs: Re-enter Webcogs OpenAI API Key".

There's no accept/reject dialog after generating code yet, but the code generations can be undone with regular undo (Ctrl-Z).

You can augment your source files with @cogs directives inside multiline comments, which indicate prompts with which parts of your code can be generated. It currently supports C-style multiline comments only (without nesting), so it works for languages like Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, Javascript, Typescript, CSS. Example:

/* The following defines the system prompt for subsequent functions.
@cogs_system_prompt
@cogs_include "systemprompt.md"

## MySQL data structure

@cogs_include "datamodel.sql"

[Enter any other file-wide system prompts here.]
*/

// Your manually crafted code goes here

/** @cogs_func getUsers
* Gets all users from the database.
* @param db - database connection
* @returns Array of user objects with fields {user_id,username,organization_id,first_name,surname,email}
*/

// AI generated code is placed between @cogs_func and @cogs_endfunc
// If Webcogs CodeLens is enabled, you will see a button to generate getUsers

/*@cogs_endfunc*/

// more manually crafted code can be put here

For full documentation, see the Github repo: https://github.com/borisvanschooten/webcogs-ai-toolkit

Extension Settings

This extension contributes the following settings:

• webcogs.enableCodeLens: Enable extension.
• webcogs.disableCodeLens: Disable extension.

Known Issues

This is as yet an experimental plugin. Error handling still needs work.

How to re-build from source

Download the repo. Make sure to install the vsce tool:

npm install -g @vscode/vsce

Go to the repo's vscode-extension/webcogs subdirectory, then:

npm run install-local-webcogs
vsce package

This will create a vsix package, which you can install in VSCode:

• go to the extensions: marketplace tab
• in the triple dot menu, select "install from VSIX"

Release Notes

0.3.1

First release, with improved docs