Orrery

Every coding agent. One sidebar. Like the clockwork instrument it's named after, Orrery puts all your models in motion from one place: it drives the agent CLIs you already have installed — Claude Code, Codex (GPT) and Grok — with their complete tool suite, streaming output and permission model. No API keys, no extra accounts: it uses each CLI's own login.

Why Orrery

Chat extensions wrap a completion API. Orrery runs the full agent harness — the same one you get in the terminal — rendered as a fast, glassy chat panel.

The agents

• Three harnesses, one chat — spin the model wheel through Claude, GPT and Grok models; every answer carries a badge for who wrote it
• Brain power — a reasoning-effort slider (Low → Max) passed straight to each CLI; levels a model can't do are greyed out
• Access levels — Read only (explore & plan), Edit files (edits land, commands blocked) or Full access (runs unattended), mapped to each CLI's own permission flags
• Full tool suite — file edits, terminal, search, web fetch, subagents, skills — whatever the active harness ships

The conversation

• Streaming with collapsible thinking sections and one-line tool runs — the tool's name underlines green on success, red on failure, with the output one chevron away
• Live task list — the agent's todo list renders as a checklist that ticks itself
• Files changed — every touched file with +/− line counts; click any state (modified, new, deleted) for a real side-by-side diff
• Cost per run — tokens in/out, duration and price under every answer, plus a running thread total. Rates for every model ship built in; when a CLI reports its own billed cost, that wins
• Attach anything — paste an image, drag files onto the dock, or pick from the workspace / anywhere on disk with @

The workflow

• Threads — persistent per-workspace conversations: pin, rename inline, duplicate, export to Markdown, full-text search, keyboard navigation
• Run several at once — start a new thread while another works; a badge counts running threads, finished ones get an unread dot. While a run is live the send button splits into stop (deep red) and new thread (dark blue)
• Quick actions — a floating two-orb rail in the chat window (fix grammar, explain, find bugs, tests, refactor, docs, commit message, review); pick, arrange or hide them entirely in settings
• Full screen — drag the panel into the editor area for a centred reading column with a thread sidebar

Make it yours — font size and control size scale separately; slider sensitivity (Relaxed / Standard / Quick); arrange or hide the composer controls; acrylic glass surfaces that respect reduced-transparency settings; custom instructions appended to every request.

Requirements

At least one of these installed and logged in:

• Claude Code — claude on your PATH, or set sideAgent.cliPath
• Codex CLI — codex on your PATH, or set sideAgent.codexPath
• Grok CLI — grok on your PATH, or set sideAgent.grokPath

Orrery finds the CLIs even when VS Code's PATH doesn't include them: the setting is tried as a path, then every PATH entry, then well-known install locations, then — on Windows — the registry PATH.

Getting started

1. Install the extension
2. Click the Orrery icon in the activity bar
3. Pick an agent and model, choose an access level, and start chatting

The settings gear opens the Providers panel: a status dot per harness (logged in / installed / missing), CLI version, who you're signed in as, an enable toggle, and the live model list. Health checks re-run every sideAgent.healthCheckInterval seconds.

How the access levels map

Settings

Building from source

npm install
npm run compile   # then press F5 for the Extension Development Host
npx @vscode/vsce package   # build a .vsix

License

MIT