Kalai Agent is an AI coding assistant for Visual Studio Code. It adds a chat sidebar to VS Code so you can ask coding questions, explore your project, and get help without switching windows.
What It Does
AI chat in VS Code - Ask coding questions and get answers from AI models inside a sidebar panel.
Streaming responses - See replies appear in real time, including reasoning when enabled.
Project-aware answers - Kalai can inspect your workspace to give context-specific help.
Read-only workspace inspection - Summarize files, search code, and explore directories without changing anything.
Optional agentic mode - Enable deeper multi-step problem solving through tool use in settings.
Inbuilt browser automation - Drive a real local Chromium browser via Playwright to navigate pages, click elements, fill forms, and extract content with live step cards in the chat timeline.
Sub-agents and plan mode - Delegate focused tasks to isolated coder, explorer, or planner sub-agents, and enter plan mode to draft a .kalai/plans/<session>.md file before executing changes.
Secure accounts - Sign up or log in through your browser. Tokens are stored in VS Code's secret storage.
Wallet-based billing - Pay as you go and recharge your wallet through Paystack.
Chat history - Conversations are saved locally so you can continue later.
Getting Started
Install from the VS Code Marketplace
Open VS Code.
Go to the Extensions view (Ctrl+Shift+X or Cmd+Shift+X on macOS).
Search for Kalai Agent.
Click Install.
Install from a VSIX file
Download the .vsix release.
Open the Extensions view in VS Code.
Click the ... menu and choose Install from VSIX....
Select the downloaded file.
First Use
Click the Kalai Agent icon in the Activity Bar to open the chat sidebar.
Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and run Kalai: Sign Up or Kalai: Log In.
Complete authentication in your browser. VS Code will handle the callback automatically.
Start typing your coding question in the chat input.
Example Questions
"Explain what this React hook does."
"How do I reverse an array in TypeScript?"
"Find all usages of the UserService class in this project."
"Summarize the architecture of this codebase."
"Refactor this function to use async/await."
"Explore the src folder and summarize the architecture with a sub-agent."
Commands
Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and type "Kalai" to access these commands:
Command
Description
Kalai: Start Chat
Open the Kalai chat sidebar.
Kalai: Clear Conversation
Start a fresh conversation.
Kalai: Sign Up
Create a Kalai account.
Kalai: Log In
Sign in to your Kalai account.
Kalai: Log Out
Clear stored session tokens.
Kalai: Show Wallet
View your current wallet balance.
Kalai: Recharge Wallet
Add funds through Paystack.
Kalai: Setup Secure Configuration
Run security configuration checks.
Community
Join the Kalai community for updates, support, and discussions:
