Awesome Coding Assistants

Browse, preview, install, and manage AI coding assistant customizations - all from within VS Code.

Awesome Coding Assistants is a universal catalog and lifecycle manager for customizations across multiple AI coding tools. Discover community-contributed agents, prompts, instructions, skills, rules, modes, and more - then install them into your workspace with a single click.

Supported Tools

Features

Browse & Discover

• Catalog tree view in the Activity Bar and Explorer sidebar
• Browse customizations organized by source, category, and tool
• Smart tool detection - automatically shows items relevant to tools detected in your workspace
• Search across all sources with multi-word filtering
• Master index support - discover sources from a curated community index

Preview & Install

• Preview any customization in a read-only editor before installing
• One-click install places files in the correct tool-specific location:
  • Copilot agents to .github/agents/
  • Copilot instructions to .github/instructions/
  • Copilot skills to .github/skills/
  • Claude rules to .claude/ or project root
  • And more...
• Conflict resolution - prompted to overwrite, keep, or diff when a file already exists
• Multi-root workspace support with folder selection

Lifecycle Management

• Automatic update detection checks for upstream changes on a configurable interval
• Visual update badges on items with available updates
• Diff-based updates - review changes before applying
• Clean uninstall removes files and cleans up the installation manifest
• Installation tracking via a local manifest with commit SHA, timestamps, and metadata

Bundles

Install curated sets of customizations in one action:

• Practice bundles group related items across tools and categories
• Cross-source bundles can reference items from different repositories
• Required vs optional items - bundles gracefully handle partial failures

Private Repositories

• GitHub token management via VS Code's SecretStorage (encrypted)
• Access private source repositories with personal access tokens
• Tokens are never logged or exposed

Getting Started

1. Install the Extension

Install from the VS Code Marketplace or search for "Awesome Coding Assistants" in the Extensions view.

2. Browse the Catalog

Open the Awesome Coding Assistants view from the Activity Bar (constellation icon) or find it collapsed in the Explorer sidebar. The extension ships with a default community source.

3. Add Custom Sources

Add your own source repositories in Settings:

// settings.json
"awesome-coding-assistants.sources": [
  {
    "url": "https://github.com/your-org/your-customizations",
    "name": "My Team's Customizations",
    "branch": "main"
  }
]

For private repos, first run Awesome Coding Assistants: Add GitHub Token from the Command Palette, then reference the token key:

{
  "url": "https://github.com/your-org/private-repo",
  "name": "Private Customizations",
  "authTokenKey": "my-github-token"
}

4. Install Customizations

Click the preview (eye) icon to inspect a customization, then click install (cloud download) to add it to your workspace.

Configuration

Commands

All commands are available from the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P):

Creating a Source Repository

A source repository is any GitHub repo containing AI coding assistant customization files. The extension auto-detects items based on file paths and conventions:

your-source-repo/
  .github/
    agents/          # Copilot agent definitions (.agent.md)
    instructions/    # Copilot instructions (.instructions.md)
    skills/          # Copilot skill packages (SKILL.md)
    prompts/         # Copilot prompt files (.prompt.md)
    chatmodes/       # Copilot chat modes
  .claude/
    agents/          # Claude Code agents
    rules/           # Claude Code rules
    commands/        # Claude Code slash commands
  .awesome-bundles/  # Optional practice bundles (JSON)

Master Index

Maintain a curated index.json listing multiple sources:

{
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jlacube/awesome-coding-assistants/main/index.schema.json",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "sources": [
    {
      "url": "https://github.com/example/copilot-customizations",
      "name": "Example Copilot Pack",
      "description": "A collection of Copilot agents and instructions",
      "tools": ["copilot"],
      "categories": ["agents", "instructions"]
    }
  ]
}

Requirements

• VS Code 1.85.0 or later
• Internet access to fetch source repositories from GitHub

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Whether it's a bug fix, a new feature, or a community source to add to the index.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch
3. Submit a pull request

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.