Decispher — Branch Story

Every branch has a story. This one's yours.

Branch Story captures your coding session as it happens — every decision, context shift, and "why did we do this?" moment — and turns your branch into a living record your team and AI agents can actually read.

Works in VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and every VS Code fork.

What problem does it solve?

You open a branch a week later and have no idea why half the code is there. Your AI agent makes the same mistake you already fixed two sprints ago. A new teammate asks "why is this done this way?" and nobody remembers.

Branch Story fixes this by recording the why as you code — not after, not in a post-mortem, but in the moment — and serving it back to you and your AI agents right inside the editor.

What it does

Branch Store sidebar — a real-time view of where your branch stands. Pre-flight briefing at the top ("3 open questions, 2 active decisions"), a merged timeline of everything captured on this branch, and linked context from your team's knowledge base.

▶ Watch how this code got here (Story Mode) — replay your branch's story chapter by chapter: what decisions were made, what was tried and rejected, what changed and why. A living commit message that actually explains the branch.

Save Context — when you hit a decision point, capture it in one click. Decispher classifies it automatically (decision, constraint, convention, rationale…) and routes it to your team's knowledge base. Your future self and AI agents will find it.

Recording light — a subtle status bar indicator showing how many moments have been captured on the current branch. Click it to open the store.

Why is this line here? — right-click any line in the editor and ask. Decispher searches your team's knowledge base for decisions and context that explain that code, surfaced inline.

Editor capture floor — save diffs are captured automatically in the background, redacted at source (no secrets ever leave your machine), and flushed to Decispher when you're back online. This is the floor: if you run npx decispher init, the native hooks provide much deeper capture (per-edit diffs, rejected attempts, full reasoning). In auto mode, the floor switches itself off when hooks are installed to avoid double-capture.

Getting started

1. Connect

Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P) and run:

Decispher: Connect (Set API Key)

Enter your API key from app.decispher.com. The key is stored in VS Code's SecretStorage — it never touches the filesystem or any config file.

2. Open the Branch Store

Click the Decispher icon in the Activity Bar (left sidebar). You'll see:

• Briefing — where this branch stands and what's still open
• Timeline — everything captured on this branch
• Corpus — linked context from your team's knowledge base

3. Capture a decision

When you make a decision worth remembering — choosing a library, ruling out an approach, hitting a constraint — click Save Context in the store. Decispher will classify it and add it to your team's knowledge base.

4. Get deeper capture (optional but recommended)

In your repo root, run:

npx decispher init

This installs native hooks for Claude Code and Cursor that capture far more depth than the editor floor alone: per-edit diffs, tool call sequences, rejected attempts, and reasoning. One command, works for the whole team.

Auth

Key resolution order (first wins):

1. DECISPHER_API_KEY environment variable
2. VS Code SecretStorage — set via Decispher: Connect
3. ~/.decispher/credentials.json — shared with the CLI (one login covers both)

API URL resolution order:

1. DECISPHER_API_URL environment variable
2. .decispher/recorder.json committed in the repository
3. decispher.apiUrl VS Code setting (default: https://api.decispher.com)

The webview never sees your API key. All network calls happen in the extension host process.

Settings

Commands

Why is this line here? is also available in the editor right-click context menu.

Works with

• VS Code 1.85+
• Cursor (via Open VSX)
• Windsurf (via Open VSX)
• VSCodium (via Open VSX)
• Any VS Code fork that resolves from the Open VSX Registry

Privacy

• Captured diffs are redacted at source before leaving your machine — file paths are stripped, secrets matching common patterns are replaced with [REDACTED].
• Raw message text is never stored. Only structured context units (decisions, constraints, rationale) are persisted.
• Offline captures are buffered locally in a JSONL file and only flushed when a connection to your Decispher workspace is established.

Full privacy policy: decispher.com

Support

• Website: decispher.com
• Dashboard: app.decispher.com