Nimbus for VS Code

Local-first AI agent for the editor. Ask and search against your private Nimbus index — all running on your machine.

Ask — chat with the Nimbus agent in a side panel; responses stream token-by-token, and a Stop button cancels a long generation cleanly while keeping the partial reply.
@nimbus Chat participant — talk to Nimbus right in VS Code's built-in Chat view: /explain, /fix, and /test operate on your selection (or file), free-form questions can pull in #file context, answers stream token-by-token, and replies include clickable citations back to local-index sources.
Quick Ask — ask about a selection (or the whole file) and get a one-shot answer in a read-only tab, without opening the chat panel.
Search — live ranked (semantic + keyword) search over your local Nimbus index; results update as you type, and selecting one opens its source (or notifies you when it has none). Search Selection seeds it from the editor.
Find related — from a selection or an Index sidebar item, pivot to the local knowledge around it (ranked search that excludes the item itself).
Selection-aware — right-click a selection to Ask About Selection, Search Selection, or Find Related.
Dev-workflow trio — Generate Commit Message drafts a message from your staged diff, in your repository's own commit style, into the Source Control input box; Review Changes reviews all local changes (staged and unstaged) in a findings tab that also names what wasn't reviewed (too large, possibly secret, binary or non-textual changes, untracked); Generate Tests and Generate Docstrings work over an editor selection, opening an untitled test buffer or a docstring diff. Output is always a suggestion — nothing is written to disk or applied automatically.
Nimbus sidebar — activity-bar views for Sessions (with chat resume), the local Index, and Agents.
Audit & Egress ledgers — inspect what the agent did and everything it sent off-device; verify the egress hash-chain and export a signed proof for any time window, all locally. A status-bar badge (shown while connected, on by default) displays the egress row count with a ledger-live ✓ — click to open the ledger, or toggle it with nimbus.egress.showStatusBarBadge.
Connection troubleshooter — Nimbus: Troubleshoot Connection explains why you're disconnected and offers one-click fixes (start the Gateway, reconnect, open logs, or edit the socket path).
Get Started walkthrough — a first-run walkthrough (Nimbus: Open Walkthrough, also on the Welcome page) that guides you from connecting the Gateway through Ask, Search, and Quick Ask.

Install

VS Code Marketplace: ext install nimbus-agent.nimbus-vscode
Open VSX (Cursor, VSCodium): ext install nimbus-agent.nimbus-vscode
Manual: download the .vsix from the latest release and run code --install-extension nimbus-<ver>.vsix.

Verifying a release

Starting with the next release after v0.5.0, every release attaches a build provenance attestation to the .vsix on the GitHub Release — this is an attestation, not a signature on the file itself. To verify a .vsix from one of those releases was built by this repository's publish workflow:

gh attestation verify nimbus-<version>.vsix --repo nimbus-agent/nimbus-vscode

This covers the .vsix attached to the GitHub Release. The Visual Studio Marketplace performs its own repository signing, which VS Code verifies at install time; that is a separate mechanism and this attestation is not surfaced through it.

Quickstart

Run Nimbus: Ask from the command palette, or right-click a selection in the editor and choose Ask About Selection / Search Selection. The extension connects to your local Nimbus Gateway automatically (enable nimbus.autoStartGateway to have it start the Gateway for you).

First time? Run Nimbus: Open Walkthrough (or open it from the Get Started / Welcome page) for a guided setup — connect the Gateway, then try Ask, Search, and Quick Ask.

Requires

A running Nimbus Gateway. See https://nimbus-agent.dev/user-guide/install/ for setup.

Settings

Setting	Default	What it does
`nimbus.socketPath`	(auto)	Override the Gateway socket path.
`nimbus.autoStartGateway`	`false`	Spawn `nimbus start` if the socket is unreachable.
`nimbus.statusBarPollMs`	`30000`	Status-bar connector-health poll interval (ms).
`nimbus.transcriptHistoryLimit`	`50`	Turns rehydrated into the chat panel on reload.
`nimbus.search.limit`	`50`	Max results per search (1–500).
`nimbus.askAgent`	(Gateway default)	Default agent name passed to Ask.
`nimbus.agents`	`[]`	Agents shown in the Agents sidebar view.
`nimbus.quickAsk.presets`	`[]`	Quick Ask preset actions (empty = Explain/Fix/Review/Docstring).
`nimbus.scm.skipSecretFiles`	`true`	Exclude likely-secret files (`.env`, `.pem`, `.key`, `id_rsa`, `.p12`, `.pfx`) from diffs sent by Generate Commit Message / Review Changes.
`nimbus.egress.showStatusBarBadge`	`true`	Show the egress row-count badge (ledger-live ✓) in the status bar.
`nimbus.hitlAlwaysModal`	`false`	Render HITL consent as a blocking modal instead of a toast.
`nimbus.logLevel`	`info`	Output-channel verbosity.

See docs/settings.md for the full reference.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. This repository was extracted from the Nimbus monorepo; it consumes @nimbus-dev/client from npm and releases independently of the Gateway.

License

MIT

Nimbus Agent

nimbus-agent