Joule Code: Always-on agents

The editor panel: an agentic coding session in a side panel, driven by the joule you already run in a terminal. The agent reads and edits the files in your workspace, runs commands and makes commits on your own machine. The panel is a front end to a local daemon, not a hosted service and not a second agent.

A terminal and this panel can drive the same session at the same time. Change the model or the approval mode in either one and the other moves with it.

Before you install: this needs the joule CLI

The extension does not carry an agent. It starts and attaches to a joule daemon, so the binary has to be on the machine the workspace is on:

npm install -g @joule-sh/code

That covers all four platforms, Windows included. A script does the same on x86_64 Linux, Apple Silicon macOS and Intel macOS, and needs no Node:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joule-sh/code/main/install.sh | sh

Either one offers to update itself. A release also publishes code-x86_64-windows.zip if you would rather have neither. The extension needs joule 0.13.0 or newer. If joule is not on PATH, point joule.path at it.

Credentials stay with the CLI. The panel never asks for an API key, never reads one, and never forwards one.

Windows

The panel drives a Windows joule the same way it drives a Linux one. An npm install is found without any setting being pointed at it.

WSL and Remote-SSH work, and are worth choosing if your files live there. Opening a folder through WSL, Remote-SSH or a dev container runs the extension on the remote side, next to the joule and the files that are there.

What the panel does

It opens on a first-run screen when nothing is configured yet: one sentence on what joule is, and the three ways it can reach a model, each as its own button: a joule account, your own provider key, or a self-hosted joule server. A missing joule, a joule too old to drive, and a configuration that cannot start a session all land here with a sentence about what to do.

An API key is never typed into the panel. The provider-key route opens ~/.config/joule-code/config.json in the editor and says so. The extension reads that file only to answer "is there a key here", never its value, and writes nothing to it but a server address you asked it to remember.

Approvals are cards, not prompts in a scrollback. When the agent wants to run a command or write a file that the current mode does not allow on its own, the panel shows what it wants to do and where it will run, and waits.

The composer carries the session's controls. A chip row names the file open beside the panel, which is what will be quoted at the top of your message and can be dismissed with a click. Below the input, the approval mode and the model sit as chips, with a line saying where tools will run and what this mode lets through without asking.

It attaches, resumes and reconnects. Close the window and the daemon keeps working; open it again and the panel picks the session back up.

Getting started

Install joule (above) and run it once in a terminal to sign in or point it at a provider.
Open a folder in your editor. The session opens in a tab beside your code, without taking focus from the file you opened.
Press Attach.

Close that tab and the joule icon in the activity bar, on the left, is still the way back to the session, as is Joule: Open the session in an editor tab and the button in the view's own title bar. Set joule.openInEditorTab to false if you would rather the editor area stayed yours and the session lived in the activity bar.

Attaching is deliberately a button rather than something that happens on open: a workspace's daemon may already be driven from a terminal, and joining it is a decision you make. Set joule.attachOnStartup if you would rather it happen every time.

Settings

setting	default	what it does
`joule.path`	`joule`	the binary the daemon is started and stopped through
`joule.openInEditorTab`	`true`	open the session in an editor tab beside your code when the window opens
`joule.attachOnStartup`	`false`	attach as soon as the window opens, instead of waiting for the button
`joule.resumeOnStart`	`false`	when this window starts the daemon, resume the folder's previous session

joule.path must be the same install a terminal would use: the daemon is started and stopped through it.

Commands

command	what it does
`Joule: Open the session in an editor tab`	open the tab beside your code, or reveal the one already open
`Joule: Attach to this workspace's session`	start or join the daemon for this folder
`Joule: Detach from the session`	leave the session running and stop rendering it
`Joule: Cancel the current turn`	stop the agent mid-turn
`Joule: Stop this workspace's daemon`	shut the daemon down

Versions, and what happens when they disagree

The extension and the CLI are cut from the same tag, so an extension and a binary carrying the same version are the pair that was tested together. Attaching runs joule --version first and refuses to go further when the binary is missing, is not a joule, or is older than 0.13.0, the oldest release this panel can drive. You get one sentence in the panel saying so, rather than a session that fails part-way through. A binary built from a checkout reports dev and is taken at its word.

Installing without the marketplace

Every release also attaches joule-editor-<version>.vsix to its GitHub release, cut from the same tag as the binaries:

code --install-extension joule-editor-<version>.vsix

or the Extensions view, through Install from VSIX.

Source and issues

The extension lives in editor/ of the joule-sh/code repository, MIT licensed.

Report a bug or ask for something