Cake Proposal 🎂
AI-powered research proposal writing assistant for VS Code.
Cake Proposal guides you through the entire process of writing a compelling research proposal — from understanding the funding call to delivering a polished, submission-ready document.
Built for academic and research-grant proposals. Not designed for commercial proposals or general-purpose writing.
Built by ResearchCake.com.
Features
🤖 Intelligent Proposal Agent
An AI assistant that understands the structure and strategy of successful research proposals. It follows a proven 8-phase workflow:
- Project Context — Understand your funding call, team, and constraints
- Research Intelligence — Analyze the academic landscape and identify gaps
- Argument Architecture — Build the logical spine of your proposal
- Methodology & Evidence — Design credible, feasible research plans
- Narrative Writing — Write polished prose tailored to your funder
- Critical Review — Score your draft like a skeptical reviewer
- Revision — Fix issues and iterate until strong
- Finalization — Export to Word (.docx) or other formats
- Web Search — Search the web for relevant information via Firecrawl
- Deep Research — Launch comprehensive literature reviews
- Academic Search — Find papers via OpenAlex (free, no API key needed)
- URL Fetching — Extract content from any web page
- Browser Action — Puppeteer-controlled browser for JavaScript-heavy sites and interactive pages
📄 Document Handling
- Convert your proposal from Markdown to Word (.docx) directly in VS Code
- Read and extract text from PDF, DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX files
- The agent knows how to generate PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files when your proposal needs them
- Reference management — Keep your sources in a
references.json file and cite them in your draft with [@key]; the agent keeps everything in sync
- Edit File — Make precise edits to your draft without rewriting whole sections
- Task List — The agent plans the work in steps and tracks progress so you can see what's left
- File Attachment — Pull workspace files into a prompt with
@mentions (e.g. @grant-call.pdf, @references.json)
💬 Chat Interface
- Sidebar chat panel integrated into VS Code
- Full editor tab mode for a larger workspace
- Session history — pick up where you left off
- Message branching — Edit and resend past messages, navigate between conversation branches
- Model selection — choose from Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and more
- See at a glance how much of your conversation history is being used
🧠 Long-Conversation Support
- Long conversations are summarized automatically so you can keep working without hitting limits
- A "Compress" button lets you trim the conversation manually whenever you want
🔐 Authentication & Safety
- Sign in with your ResearchCake.com account
- Usage-based billing with live balance display
- Or bring your own OpenRouter API key
- Approval prompts — Decide whether the agent should ask before doing risky things like writing files or running commands
- Fallback model — If the primary model fails, the agent automatically retries with a backup so your work isn't interrupted
Getting Started
- Install the extension from the VS Code Marketplace
- Open a folder where you want to write your proposal
- Click the Cake Proposal icon in the Activity Bar
- Sign in with your ResearchCake.com account, or configure your own API key in Settings
- Start chatting — tell the agent about your funding call and research idea
Configuration
Open Settings → search for Cake Proposal. Most users only need the common settings below.
Common settings
| Setting |
Description |
cake-proposal.model |
AI model to use (default: Claude Sonnet 4.6) |
cake-proposal.fallbackModel |
Backup model used when the primary model fails (disabled by default) |
cake-proposal.safety.autoApprove |
Whether the agent runs tools without asking. Default: on — turn off if you'd like to be asked before medium/high-risk operations such as file writes or shell commands. |
cake-proposal.api.openrouter.key |
Your OpenRouter API key (only needed if you're not signed in to ResearchCake and test basic function) |
Advanced settings
These point at Research Cake's internal services. You normally won't need to change them — signed-in users get sensible defaults automatically.
| Setting |
Description |
cake-proposal.api.researchcake.url |
Research Cake API base URL |
cake-proposal.api.firecrawl.endpoint / .key |
Firecrawl service used for web search |
cake-proposal.api.deep-research.endpoint / .key |
Deep Research service for comprehensive literature reviews |
cake-proposal.api.grobid.endpoint |
GROBID service used to extract clean text from downloaded research papers |
Privacy
Your draft files stay on your machine. Only the prompts and the file content you choose to share are sent to the LLM provider you've selected (e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI — routed via OpenRouter or your own API key).
Requirements
Support
License
This is proprietary software. See LICENSE for details.
Copyright © 2025-2026 ResearchCake.com. All rights reserved.
