Got a minute while your AI Agent runs? Read high-density, AI-distilled tech news directly inside your editor sidebar while waiting on Claude Code, Cursor Composer, or background tests.
With long-running AI coding agents handling complex multi-file refactors, software engineering has a new downtime: waiting for the agent to finish. Instead of losing your context by picking up your phone or opening Twitter, open NewsScroll in your sidebar to skim the latest engineering blogs and framework releases.
How it works
NewsScroll lives in the Activity Bar as a sidebar panel. Click the icon to open it. Articles are displayed one at a time in a full-panel, vertical snap-scroll layout — scroll down to go to the next article, scroll up to go back. Click any card to open the full article reader inline.
The feed learns from what you read and save, and gets more relevant over time.
Sources
NewsScroll aggregates tech news from across the industry, including:
- Developer news: Hacker News, Dev.to, Stack Overflow Blog, GitHub Blog, Lobste.rs, The New Stack
- Tech media: TechCrunch, The Verge, Ars Technica, Wired, VentureBeat, IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, Smashing Magazine, InfoQ, The Register
- Security: Krebs on Security, BleepingComputer, The Hacker News, Dark Reading, SecurityWeek
- Cloud & infrastructure: AWS News Blog, Google Cloud Blog, Cloudflare Blog, Mozilla Hacks
The article card
Each article fills the full panel. A card shows:
- A background image, or a gradient fallback when no image is available
- A category badge — the topic area the article was classified into (e.g. TECHNOLOGY, SCIENCE, BUSINESS)
- The article title
- A short summary — click to expand if it is clipped to three lines
- Two action buttons: Save and Share
Save
Bookmarks the article to your Saved tab. The button turns yellow when an article is saved. Click again to unsave.
Share
Copies the article's original link to your clipboard. The button briefly shows "Copied!" to confirm.
Reading an article
Click anywhere on the card (outside the action buttons) to open the full article reader. The reader slides up and displays the complete article text fetched from the source. Close it by clicking outside or using the close control.
Navigation
The bottom of the panel has two tabs:
- Feed — your personalized tech news feed
- Saved — all articles you have bookmarked
Profile menu
Click the profile button in the top-right corner to open the account menu:
| Option | When shown |
|---|---|
| Report a bug | Always — opens a text form to send a bug report from within VS Code |
| Sign up with Google | When using a guest (anonymous) session |
| Logout | When signed in |
Account and personalization
No account is needed to start reading. NewsScroll creates an anonymous session on first launch and begins personalizing your feed immediately based on what you read and save.
Sign in with Google to persist your saved articles and feed preferences across machines. When you click "Sign up with Google", a browser window opens for OAuth — once complete, the extension picks up your session automatically.
Getting started
- Click the NewsScroll icon in the Activity Bar on the left side of VS Code.
- Scroll through articles. Click a card to read the full text.
- Click Save on any card to bookmark it — find it later in the Saved tab.
- Click the profile button (top-right) to sign in with Google or report a bug.
Alternatively, open the Command Palette (Cmd+Shift+P on Mac / Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows/Linux`) and run Open NewsScroll.
Requirements
- VS Code 1.80 or later
- An internet connection