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AI Chat

AI Chat is a built-in assistant that can answer programming questions, generate code, and explain or refactor what's already in your editor. It runs against the AI provider you configure in Settings → AI, so you can connect it to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Mistral, or a local model served by a tool such as Ollama.

AI Chat

Opening AI Chat​

Open AI Chat from the Activity Bar on the left edge of the window. It appears as a sidebar to the left of the editor pane, and the same icon closes it again.

If the Activity Bar is hidden, enable it from the View menu or under Settings → Appearance.

Sending prompts​

Type your prompt into the textarea at the bottom of the sidebar and press send. Responses stream back as the model generates them.

AI Chat can see the code in your current tab, so you don't need to paste it into your prompt. Prompts like these work as they are:

  • "Explain what this function does."
  • "Refactor this to use async/await."
  • "There's a bug in this code. Can you find it?"
  • "Add JSDoc comments to each function."

You can also ask general programming questions that don't depend on your code, such as language features, API behaviour, or debugging strategies.

Configuration​

Before AI Chat can send requests, you need to configure a provider, model, and API key under Settings → AI. API keys are stored locally and used only to authenticate requests to the provider you selected.

If you want to run a model locally, choose Local as the provider and point the Base URL at the endpoint exposed by your local runtime (for example, an Ollama instance running on http://localhost:11434).