Cognee — Project Memory (VS Code)

Give your editor a persistent, citable memory of the project. Remember and recall knowledge without leaving VS Code, and ask your project memory — get answers grounded in what Cognee knows about the current repository, with links back to the source files.

Powered by Cognee. Works against a local Cognee server or a Cognee Cloud tenant.

Features

Remember Selection / Remember File / Remember Note — store code, files, or a free-form note into per-repository memory.
Ask My Project Memory — a panel that answers questions about the repo, with ranked, clickable citations that open the exact source file.
Recall — a quick query from the command palette.
Index Workspace — opt-in bulk ingest, respecting .gitignore/.cogneeignore (and always skipping dependency/build directories), with a preflight summary.
Forget Project Memory — clear the graph (keep files) or delete the dataset.
Per-repository isolation — each repo maps to a stable vscode_<hash> dataset (from the git remote, or the workspace path as a fallback).

Requirements

A reachable Cognee backend — either of:

Cognee Cloud (no local setup): your tenant URL (e.g. https://<tenant>.cognee.ai) and an API key.
Local server: a Cognee server running on http://localhost:8011 (see the Cognee docs); this path needs its own .env (e.g. LLM_API_KEY).

The extension itself needs no environment variables — it is configured entirely through VS Code settings and secret storage.

Quick start

Run Cognee: Set Up from the command palette.
- Enter your endpoint (http://localhost:8011 or your Cloud tenant URL).
- Enter your API key if using Cloud (stored securely in the OS keychain, not in settings).
- The command runs a health check so you know the connection works.
Open a file, select some code, and run Cognee: Remember Selection.
Run Cognee: Ask My Project Memory and ask a question — the answer appears with its sources.

Commands

Command	What it does
`Cognee: Ask My Project Memory`	Open the panel and query the repo's memory with citations.
`Cognee: Recall`	One-off query from the palette.
`Cognee: Remember Selection`	Store the current selection (or the whole file).
`Cognee: Remember File`	Store a file (also on the explorer context menu).
`Cognee: Remember Note`	Store a free-form note typed into an input box.
`Cognee: Index Workspace`	Bulk-ingest eligible files after a preflight confirmation.
`Cognee: Forget Project Memory`	Clear memory (keep files) or delete the dataset.
`Cognee: Set Up`	Configure endpoint + key and run a health check.

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
`cognee.endpoint`	`http://localhost:8011`	Cognee backend base URL.
`cognee.apiKey`	`""`	API key (`X-Api-Key`). Prefer `Cognee: Set Up`, which uses secret storage.
`cognee.datasetOverride`	`""`	Fixed dataset name; empty derives `vscode_<hash>` per repo.
`cognee.searchType`	`auto`	Recall strategy; `auto` lets Cognee route the query.
`cognee.topK`	`15`	Max recall results.
`cognee.includeReferences`	`true`	Attach source citations to answers.
`cognee.ingestion.respectGitignore`	`true`	Skip `.gitignore`/`.cogneeignore` files when indexing (dependency/build dirs are always skipped).
`cognee.ingestion.maxFileSizeKb`	`512`	Skip files larger than this when indexing.
`cognee.requestTimeoutMs`	`300000`	HTTP request timeout.

How it works

The extension talks to Cognee over the HTTP API:

Ask / Recall → POST /api/v1/recall with include_references: true, scoped to the workspace dataset. Citations are parsed from the answer's Evidence block (chunk/document level today), then ranked by relevance to the query and de-duplicated so each source file appears once. Everything the extension ingests carries a Source: <path> header, so a citation resolves straight to the exact file — even when several files share a name. It falls back to a per-workspace path index (the exact path of each file you remember), then snippet-content matching, then a user pick, only when genuinely ambiguous.
Remember / Index → POST /api/v1/remember (ingest + graph build in one call).
Forget → POST /api/v1/forget.

All editor-agnostic logic lives in src/core (no vscode imports), so it is unit-tested against a mocked backend and can back other editors (e.g. a JetBrains sidecar) unchanged.

Development

npm install
npm run build      # bundle to dist/extension.js (esbuild)
npm run typecheck  # tsc --noEmit
npm test           # vitest — runs against a mocked backend, no live keys

Press F5 in this folder to launch an Extension Development Host with the extension loaded.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.

Cognee — Project Memory

cognee