Lime Code

Lime is an AI coding assistant that lives where you work. A streaming chat sidebar with the full agentic loop, editor surfaces (Code Actions, CodeLens, SCM, inline completions), and a terminal companion for running lime in your shell while VS Code handles diff review.

Quick start

1. Install the engine. The extension talks to a local lime binary over stdio — install it once and put it on your PATH. The Get started with Lime walkthrough has download links and tells you how to point the extension at a custom path.
2. Open the Lime sidebar from the Activity Bar (the lime tile).
3. Send a message. The first message lazily spawns the engine; from there you have streaming markdown, slash commands, file mentions, permission prompts, session history, and fork.

You can also keep using lime in the terminal — VS Code will detect it and route diff review, selection context, and diagnostics to the editor automatically.

What you get

Chat sidebar

• Streaming markdown with VS Code-themed syntax highlighting.
• /slash autocomplete sourced live from the engine.
• @file mentions backed by vscode.workspace.findFiles.
• Permission prompts with rule-pattern picker — pick bash(git:*) or write_file(src/*), not just the bare tool name.
• Session list, continue, fork (with optional branch name).
• Tool-call cards updated in place when results land. bash / bash_session output renders in a real VS Code Pseudoterminal with ANSI colors and native scrollback.

Editor surfaces

• Code Actions on diagnostics ("Ask Lime to fix") and selections ("Refactor with Lime", "Explain selection").
• CodeLens above functions — Explain · Test · Refactor (off by default; flip lime.codeLens.enabled).
• Source Control group "Edited by Lime" tracking files the agent touched in the current session, with one-click diff vs HEAD.
• Inline completions via a fast single-shot bridge RPC (off by default).

Copilot Chat integration

• @lime chat participant in the built-in VS Code Chat panel (off by default; requires GitHub Copilot Chat).
• Read-only Lime tools (lime_grep, lime_glob, lime_read, lime_lsp) registered as vscode.lm tools so other Copilot agents can call them.

MCP

• Lime's configured MCP servers are surfaced to VS Code via the McpServerDefinitionProvider API — Copilot Chat sees the same catalog without duplicating .vscode/mcp.json.

IDE companion (terminal users)

• Per-window WebSocket server, lockfile-discovered by the lime CLI.
• Bearer-token gated upgrade, localhost-only.
• The CLI delegates diff review, selection access, and diagnostics to VS Code via the registered MCP tools.

Requirements

• VS Code 1.95 or newer.
• A local lime binary (the extension does not bundle one). The walkthrough has install instructions; you can also point at any custom path via lime.engine.path.

Settings

Privacy & telemetry

Telemetry is double-gated: the global VS Code #telemetry.telemetryLevel# setting and lime.telemetry.enabled must both be on. Events carry counts, durations, status enums, and tool families — never prompts, file contents, paths, session IDs, model IDs, or tool arguments / outputs.

Open the Lime output channel to see exactly what would be sent.

Trust model

The extension declares limited support for both untrusted and virtual workspaces:

• In an untrusted workspace Lime still works, but lime.ide.lockfileDir is restricted because it can change where the companion publishes its lockfile.
• In a virtual workspace the companion is disabled (it requires a local CLI process).

Edits and shell commands run through the engine and are gated by the permission prompt; nothing escapes the agent loop unconfirmed.

Support

Use the Q&A tab on this extension's Marketplace page for questions and feedback.

License

MIT — see the bundled LICENSE file.