bk1 — dbt coding agent

Run bk1, a terminal-native coding agent for dbt Core projects, right inside VS Code — and give it live awareness of the file you're looking at.

bk1 pairs a deterministic Rust linter (it mechanically checks your project against Kimball-flavored dbt conventions before spending a single LLM token) with a dbt-aware agent that investigates failed runs, explains and documents models, and answers dimensional-modeling questions grounded in The Data Warehouse Toolkit. This extension is the VS Code companion: it launches bk1 as an editor tab and streams your editor context to it.

What this extension does

• Opens bk1 as an editor tab — click Open bk1 (in the bk1 activity-bar view, the editor title bar, or the bk1: Open bk1 command). It opens in a split beside your code, Claude Code–style.
• Auto-installs bk1 on first use — no manual setup. On first launch it downloads the platform-matched bk1 binary + sidecars from GitHub Releases into the extension's storage. No Bun or Rust toolchain required.
• Streams IDE context to the agent — the active file path and current selection are written to ~/.bk1/ide-context.json (debounced). bk1 reads it at the start of each turn and injects it as context, so the agent knows what you're looking at without you pasting it.
• Status & Activity Log views — a sidebar panel shows the current file, language, selection range, and a recent log of file-open / selection / file-close events the agent is seeing.

Requirements

• An Anthropic API key — bk1 prompts for it on first run and stores it at ~/.bk1/auth.json (chmod 0600). bk1 is bring-your-own-key; it uses the Anthropic API directly with no cloud account.
• A dbt Core project — open a folder containing dbt_project.yml and bk1 launches against it.
• Platform: prebuilt binaries ship for macOS (Apple Silicon), macOS (Intel), and Linux x64. On other platforms, build bk1 from source (instructions).

Getting started

1. Install this extension.
2. Open a dbt project folder in VS Code.
3. Click the bk1 icon in the activity bar, then Open bk1 (first launch downloads the binary).
4. Enter your Anthropic API key when prompted.
5. Type /help inside bk1 to see all skills (/investigate, /explain, /docs, /lint, /lint-deep, /kimball, and more).

Keyboard shortcuts

These only apply while the bk1 terminal tab is focused — they leave every other terminal and editor untouched:

• Ctrl+T — toggle bk1's terminal/agent input mode
• Ctrl+L — clear bk1's screen

Notes

• User data lives at ~/.bk1 (API key, usage history, pet state) — separate from the downloaded binary, so it survives extension upgrades.
• The extension and the standalone CLI share that ~/.bk1 directory, so authentication carries over if you also run bk1 directly in your terminal.
• Set the BK1_BINARY environment variable to an absolute path to use your own locally built bk1 instead of the auto-downloaded release (handy when developing bk1 itself).

Learn more

bk1 is open source. Full documentation, the CLI, the Rust linter, and the bundled Kimball knowledge base all live in one repo: https://github.com/keith-fajardo/bk1

bk1 is built by Mangrove. The name is short for bakawan — Filipino for mangrove.