Overcast for VS Code

The situation room in your editor: senses on your media, OSINT on your sources, a wall to monitor the situation.

overcast turns footage into cited evidence: it watches, listens to, and reads your media, scans OSINT sources, and keeps everything in an investigation case where every answer cites the exact record and timestamp. This extension puts that power where your media already lives — right-click a clip in the Explorer, and the case builds itself in the sidebar.

Right-click any media file

Select a video, image, or audio file in the Explorer — or open one in the editor — and the Overcast menu puts senses on it:

• Watch — describe a video scene by scene: what happens, what's said, what's on screen.
• Listen — transcribe the speech out of audio or video.
• See — describe an image and read the text in it.
• Detect Faces — find the people in a frame or clip.
• EXIF Metadata — GPS, capture time, and the camera fingerprint that ties photos to a device.
• Chronolocate — check a photo's claimed time against the sun and shadows.
• Enhance — denoise, upscale, forensic overlays.
• Find Similar / Audio Fingerprint / Voice Match — search the case's local image, sound, and speaker databases.
• View / Grid — an instant media player; a timestamped frame board for skimming an hour of footage at a glance.

Multi-select and Analyze All Selected runs the right sense per file across a whole folder of footage. Every result lands in the case as an evidence record with an id — citable, reviewable, permanent.

The investigation view

The Overcast view in the activity bar is the case's living crime board, laid out along the intelligence cycle:

• Case deck — the case name (click it to switch case folders), a CLI status dot, and one-press actions grouped by phase: Prepare (Case Setup, Add Source), Collect (Scan), Process (Analyze Media), Analyze (New Note, Map, Graph), Present (Brief, Wall, Situation) — plus the agent terminal.
• Sources & Monitors — the standing OSINT watch (YouTube, X, Telegram, webcams, police dispatch, flights, …) with per-source freshness. Expand a source to see the media it grabbed; the Analyzed media folder rolls up everything a sense has touched, and Indexes lists the case's search databases. Right-click a source to scan it now, or a media item to analyze it.
• Records — the evidence trail, newest first, one click from any record's full payload (media plays alongside it; notes render as markdown).
• Investigation — your lines of investigation, each with its linked evidence, and a Notes & leads queue where machine-suggested leads (a face match, a matched frame, a target phrase) wait with inline ✓ accept / ✗ dismiss — nothing becomes evidence until you say so.
• Runs — every CLI run as a job: spinner + elapsed + inline cancel while it works, result deep-link when it's done.

Artifacts open as editor tabs: the Map plots every GPS-carrying record, the Graph connects the dots between people, places, findings, and media, the Wall loops case video at its evidence moments, the Brief is the mission report, and the Situation panel is a live, self-refreshing control room over the case's feeds.

The extension is a thin client of the overcast CLI: reads ride case status --json / case records --json plus fs-watching the .overcast/ store, and every action spawns overcast … — the CLI and its record contract stay the single source of truth.

Chat

When a chat provider (e.g. GitHub Copilot) is installed, Overcast adds two chat surfaces — both thin clients of the CLI, producing ordinary case records:

• @overcast chat participant: free text (or /ask) answers a question over the case's evidence, with citations; /scan scans the configured OSINT sources for new material, /capture <scan-hit id | url> pulls a scan hit or URL into the case, /sense <verb> <file> analyzes a media file (watch, listen, see, faces, EXIF), /note <text> records an analyst observation, /status shows lines of investigation + suggested leads + source freshness, /brief renders the mission brief. Answers stream as markdown with Open Record buttons for every produced or cited record id.
• Six language-model tools for agent mode: #overcastStatus, #overcastAsk, #overcastScan, #overcastCapture, #overcastSense, #overcastNote — or let the model pick them itself.

Network + confirmation. Scan and capture reach the network. Every language-model tool invocation shows a confirmation dialog carrying the exact overcast … command line before anything runs; ask and status are read-only. A needs_credentials failure is relayed verbatim so the model can tell you what to configure.

Requirements

• The overcast CLI: npm install -g @kdrrr/overcast, or point the overcast.path setting at a binary or a built dist/bin/overcast.js (a .js path runs on the extension host's own Node).
• A case folder in the workspace (or run "Overcast: Initialize Case Here").

Install

From the Marketplace (recommended): search for Overcast in the Extensions view, or install kdrrr.overcast directly (ext install kdrrr.overcast from Quick Open).

From a GitHub release: every overcast release attaches overcast-<version>.vsix. Download it, then either run

code --install-extension overcast-<version>.vsix

or, in VS Code: Extensions view → ··· menu → Install from VSIX… and pick the downloaded file.

From source:

cd vscode
npm install
npm run build         # tsup (host → dist/extension.cjs) + vite (SPA → dist/webview)
npm run package       # @vscode/vsce → ../.dev/overcast-<version>.vsix
code --install-extension ../.dev/overcast-*.vsix