A minimal agentic coding assistant for VS Code. Chat, a small set of built-in tools,
configurable LLM providers, MCP integration — and deliberately nothing else.
No telemetry, ever. No default endpoints. A fresh install contacts nothing until you
configure a provider.
What it does
Fire Code: every codebase in one Windows window, each with its own Light Code agent working in parallel
2026-11-15
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The basics
Syntax-highlighted code in every reply, in any language — including ones it has never
heard of.
Chat in the sidebar, with an autonomous multi-step agent loop — one tool call per
step, your approval between steps, until the task is done.
Read, search, write, diff, run. ripgrep-backed search, a strict apply_diff with no
fuzzy matching, and shell commands in the integrated terminal.
Any provider you can reach. OpenAI-compatible, Anthropic Messages, and Google Gemini,
behind named profiles you can switch between. Presets prefill a base URL; every field
stays editable.
Corporate gateways are a first-class case: mutual TLS with client certificates,
OAuth client-credentials token exchange, custom CA bundles configured once and applied
everywhere, and a Test Connection button that tells you which step failed.
MCP servers over stdio or Streamable HTTP, with per-server and per-tool controls.
Approval that shows ground truth — the literal command, the computed diff — never the
model's description of what it intends to do.
Modes. Code, Ask (read-only), Agent team, and Auto — shell-first working, where
reading and searching and compiling run without stopping you, and anything that writes,
deletes or executes still asks. What counts as read-only is a list you can see and add to.
Excel and Outlook on Windows, opt-in and off by default. Attach to the workbook you
already have open and trace a #DIV/0! back through its precedents across sheets; search
your mail; compose a message with attachments and embedded images, which it shows you
rather than sends.
Checkpoints. A shadow-git snapshot before the first edit of a task, so you can undo
everything in one click. Your own git repository is never touched.
Task history. Conversations survive closing the panel, reloading the window, and
restarting VS Code.
Reading what you actually work with
Word, Excel, HTML and PDF as plain text, with no extra dependency. A PDF whose fonts
carry no character map is reported rather than returned as garbled text — being told to
convert the file beats a confident summary of nonsense.
Large log files, a page at a time — read the tail, or a line window, without pulling a
gigabyte into the context window.
Folders outside the workspace, including Windows network shares. The assistant asks
when it needs one and shows the resolved path; allow it once, or allow the folder. Reading
only — edits stay confined to the workspace, because that is what checkpoints can undo.
Attach any file, not only images. Text is included in the message; images go to
vision-capable models.
Extending it
Python tools the model writes. Off by default. uv-managed, dependency blocks
installed from your own index, and every tool pinned to a hash of the source you approved —
a .py that changes on disk is refused, not quietly reloaded.
Skills: markdown you or the assistant writes down about your codebase. Only the name
and one-line description cost context; the body is read on demand. Several folders
supported, including read-only shared ones.
Semantic search over your code and over the tool catalogue — against a local Qdrant
or Chroma container, or an OpenSearch cluster you already run. Opt-in and disabled by
default, with a dispatcher that keeps tool schemas out of the prompt when you have more tools
than context. The local backends mean your code is embedded and stored on your own machine.
Moving between stores copies the vectors across rather than re-embedding everything.
Scheduled prompts that run on their own, each with an explicit allowlist of the tools
it may use — the default is none. Runs happen in the background without touching the
conversation you are in, and leave a transcript you can open in an editor tab.
Notifications, including a Markdown report the notification can open.
Spending less
Junior mode. A cheap model does the work and consults Claude — through your own Claude
CLI — for the plan. The expert splits the work into checkpoints and reviews each one, and
consultations continue a single conversation, which measured about nineteen times cheaper
than starting cold each time.
A budget for that expert, per chat: stop after so many dollars or so many
consultations. Set it in the chat header, adjust it mid-conversation, and the expert is
told what remains so it plans to fit. It also estimates what the task will cost when it
gives you the plan, so you can set the budget before the work starts rather than after.
The expert can assess your cheaper model. It puts five short probes to it, grades the
actual answers, and tells you what to trust it with — then sizes its own plans accordingly.
A judgement about the model in front of it, not a recollection about a model name.
A context budget you can see: system prompt, tool definitions, conversation, and tool
results, with cache hit rate.
What it deliberately does not do
Minimalism is the point, not a stage it will grow out of:
No browser automation. If you want it, configure a Chrome DevTools MCP server yourself.
No OCR, and no attempt to guess at a PDF it cannot decode.
No telemetry, no update checks, no remote assets, no analytics sent to anyone. The usage
dashboard (Settings → Usage) collects only into a store your team already configured - an
OpenSearch or other vector store, a team S3 bucket, or a shared folder you choose - and writes
only there: names and times, never your arguments or files. It can be stopped per machine.
To show people by name it reads the company directory (Windows' own sign-in, search only) on a
domain-joined Windows machine.
No cloud account, no sign-in, no hosted component.
Getting started
Install the extension and click the Light Code icon in the Activity Bar.
Open Settings (the icon in the panel header) → Providers → Add Provider.
Pick a preset, paste an API key, choose a model, and Save.
Start chatting.
Everything is configured through the panel. You never need to hand-edit a file, though you
can — the settings UI and the config file share one schema, so both fail the same way.
Several codebases at once, on Windows
Fire Code puts every codebase you work on in one window, each with its own Light Code
agent working in parallel — background chats keep going while you look at another. It can use the
settings a codebase already has (the VS Code extension's, or IntelliJ/PyCharm's), installs with
npm i -g @chosengeneration/fire-code without compiling or downloading anything, and is
described in apps/sun/README.md.
Where things are stored
What
Where
Config
The extension's global storage, or .lightcode/config.json for workspace scope
Secrets
VS Code SecretStorage (DPAPI on Windows, Keychain on macOS, libsecret on Linux)
Conversations
Global storage, per workspace
API keys, certificate passphrases, and OAuth secrets are stored as references. The config
file only ever holds a pointer, never a value — so exporting your config to share a working
gateway setup is safe by construction rather than by redaction.
Security
Read this before using it anywhere sensitive.
The boundary
Light Code makes no network connection you have not configured. It ships with zero default
endpoints, no telemetry, no update checks, and no remote assets. The only hosts it
contacts are the model gateway, the MCP servers, and — if you enable indexing — the vector
store and embedding endpoint named in your config. Each other integration you switch on (S3,
Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, Jenkins, AutoSys, the usage dashboard's shared store, a JupyterHub codebase in Fire Code) contacts
only the address you gave it.
Indexing is the largest egress in the product. Enabling it sends the contents of your
workspace to the embedding endpoint you configured. It is opt-in, ships disabled, and
confirms the destination the first time you use it.
Enabling the expert spends money on your Claude account. It is off by default, nothing
is spawned until you turn it on, and every consultation's cost appears in the chat.
What is outside that boundary
Light Code does not sandbox anything it runs on your instruction. Shell commands, MCP
servers, Python tools, and the Claude CLI execute with your full user privileges, with
access to your files, your network, and your environment. This is the same trust model as
running the command yourself in a terminal.
It does not protect you from another process running as the same user. Anything that can
read your VS Code storage can read your config. Secrets go to the OS keychain, which raises
the bar, but a process running as you is not an attacker this can defend against.
We would rather say this plainly than imply protection that does not exist.
What it does defend against
A hostile repository cannot repoint your credentials. Provider profiles, the active
profile, certificate directories, and approval settings are user-scope only, and are
ignored if found in a workspace config file. Cloning a repo cannot make Light Code talk to
someone else's gateway, nor pre-approve its own shell commands.
Approval shows ground truth. The prompt renders the literal command and the real
computed diff, so a model cannot describe one action and perform another.
"Always allow" is exact-match, byte for byte. Allowing npm test allows exactly
npm test. npm test; rm -rf / is a different string and still prompts. There is no
pattern or prefix matching, deliberately — a parsing bug in one would auto-approve a
chained destructive command.
The model must read a file before editing it, which eliminates a class of hallucinated
edits.
Certificate and key files must live outside the workspace, and their paths are on a
hard deny list for every file-reading tool.
Secrets are write-only across the UI boundary. The interface can ask whether a secret
is set; it can never read one back.
Requires Node 17+ and pnpm (Node 20+ to develop; the published package runs on 17).
pnpm install --ignore-scripts # --ignore-scripts is deliberate; see CLAUDE.md invariant 4
pnpm build
pnpm test
pnpm package # produces a .vsix
Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host.
Fire Code (apps/sun) also needs Rust 1.86+ with the MSVC toolchain:
node apps/sun/scripts/build.mjs builds the host, the exe and the npm package, and
node apps/sun/scripts/smoke.mjs installs that package with plain npm and runs it.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md. CLAUDE.md is the durable record of
design decisions and the reasons behind them — read it before proposing a change to
anything it covers.
Credits
Built greenfield, using the archived Roo Code
(Apache-2.0) as a frozen reference for proven formats and patterns — notably the
search/replace diff format that models are heavily trained on. Not a fork, and no code
copied without attribution.
