Earn from the thinking moment. IdleAds shows a single tasteful sponsor line in your
status bar while your AI agent works, and pays you 70% of the revenue per
provably-real impression — no editor patching, no creepy tracking.
What it does
Adds one status-bar item (our own real estate — every extension may do this). It
shows the current sponsor line with a subtle ↗. Click it to visit the sponsor.
Polls the IdleAds gateway for the server-decided ad every ~60s (the server runs the
auction and picks the ad — the extension is a renderer).
Measures real viewability: it reports on-screen time only while your VS Code window
is actually focused, and only a validated impression (≥5s) is billed to the advertiser
and credited to you. The server recomputes everything — the client is never trusted.
Sign in
IdleAds: Sign in (command palette) opens your browser for a device-code authorization.
The bearer token is stored in VS Code SecretStorage (OS keychain). Signed out, the
extension runs in demo mode and earns nothing.
Commands
Command
IdleAds: Sign in / Sign out
device-code auth
IdleAds: Open dashboard
your earnings + payouts on the web
IdleAds: Pause / resume ads
hide the status-bar item + stop measuring
IdleAds: Open the current sponsor link
what clicking the item does
Settings
Setting
Default
idleads.gatewayUrl
https://idleads.dev
gateway base URL (use http://localhost:8791 for local dev)
idleads.enabled
true
show ads + accrue earnings
Privacy
We measure time the window is focused while an ad is shown — nothing about your code,
prompts, files, or projects. The only identifiers are a random device id and your account.