Desiide

An open-source, AI-native IDE where you bring your own models and every AI decision is visible.

Status: pre-alpha. Desiide is being built in the open. Nothing is installable yet. The first release (Alpha) will be the Desiide desktop app for macOS and Linux. See the roadmap for what's done and what's next.

About

Desiide is a VS Code–based coding environment built around three ideas:

• Bring your own models. Point Desiide at a local model (Ollama) or your own Anthropic or OpenAI-compatible key. There's no Desiide account, no Desiide cloud, and no telemetry.
• Route work by task, not by habit. Desiide uses Jev (by TypeSafe) as a decision layer. For each task it chooses a workflow and a model: cheap/local first, escalating to a stronger model when the task is complex or the first attempt fails. That keeps cost down without giving up quality where it matters.
• Nothing risky happens silently. Every edit is a reviewable diff, and every command passes a policy gate: a hard deny-list first, then a risk check. Side-effecting actions ask by default. Each routing and risk decision is shown with its reasons and probabilities, and can be replayed.

How it works

┌───────────────── VS Code / Desiide ────────────────┐
│  desiide-ai extension                               │
│  Prompt Box · Task stream · Diff review ·           │
│  Approvals · Decision panel · Settings              │
└───────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┘
                │ JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio (no ports)
┌───────────────▼─────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Orchestrator (child process, no vscode imports)     │
│  Task engine & agent loop · Workflows                │
│  (single / cascade / critique) · Tool runner ·       │
│  Context engine                                      │
├──────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┤
│  Model adapters      │  Jev decisions               │
│  OpenAI-compatible,  │  workflow_select · risk_gate │
│  Ollama, Anthropic   │  cost_route · policy · log   │
└──────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┘

• The orchestrator never writes files. It proposes search/replace edits, and the extension applies them through VS Code's WorkspaceEdit after you approve, so undo and dirty buffers work as usual.
• Jev only sees metadata: task type, file paths and sizes, the command being gated. It never sees file contents. Jev is off until you configure it, and without it Desiide runs on a built-in deterministic rules engine.
• API keys live only in VS Code SecretStorage. Config refers to them as secret:<name>, and the orchestrator requests them over RPC when needed. They're never written to env, logs, or files.

The full wire contract is in docs/protocol.md.

Release plan

Milestone	What ships
Alpha	The Desiide desktop app (a VSCodium fork) for macOS and Linux, from GitHub Releases, with the AI features built in.
Beta	Critique workflow and the live Jev API. The desiide-ai extension is also published on Open VSX and the VS Code Marketplace, for people who stay in VS Code.
1.0	Hardening, Windows, signed builds, and team features.

Details, build order, and module status: roadmap/README.md. Architecture decisions: roadmap/DECISIONS.md.

Repository layout

Path	What's there
extensions/desiide-ai/	The VS Code extension. All AI and Jev UI lives here.
packages/protocol/	zod schemas for everything crossing the extension ↔ orchestrator boundary
packages/orchestrator/	Task engine, workflows, tool runner, context engine
packages/models/	Model adapters (OpenAI-compatible, Ollama, Anthropic)
packages/jev/	Jev engine, decision packs, policy gate, decision log
editor/	The VSCodium fork: the Desiide desktop app
roadmap/	Milestones, module briefs, standards, decisions
docs/	Developer docs

Development

Requirements: Node 24 (see .nvmrc) and pnpm 12.

npm i -g pnpm@12.6.0   # corepack in Node 24.11 can't launch pnpm 12 yet
pnpm install
scripts/verify.sh      # typecheck + lint + tests; must be green before a PR

Useful commands:

pnpm -F @desiide/protocol test   # one package's tests
pnpm format                   # Prettier

Stack: TypeScript (strict, ESM), pnpm workspaces, zod at every boundary, Vitest, ESLint flat config, and Prettier. Internal packages are consumed as TypeScript source and bundled with esbuild.

Building the Desiide app

The desktop app is built from our VSCodium fork, SaketMunda/desiide-vscodium, which lives in editor/ as a git submodule. Day-to-day work on the AI features doesn't need the app build: develop desiide-ai in regular VS Code with F5.

You need macOS or Linux, git, jq, python3, curl, the Xcode Command Line Tools (macOS), and about 15 GB of free disk. Rust isn't needed. The script downloads the Node version VSCodium pins by itself.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/SaketMunda/desiide.git
# or, in an existing clone:
git submodule update --init editor

scripts/build-editor.sh           # ~7 min on an M4 Pro; re-runs reuse the downloaded source
scripts/build-editor.sh --clean   # re-download the upstream VS Code source first

The app lands in editor/VSCode-darwin-arm64/Desiide.app (Linux: editor/VSCode-linux-<arch>/). It keeps its data in ~/.desiide and ~/Library/Application Support/Desiide, separate from VS Code and VSCodium. If you launch it from a terminal inside VS Code, unset ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE first:

env -u ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE editor/VSCode-darwin-arm64/Desiide.app/Contents/MacOS/Desiide

Checking the built app. pnpm -F desiide-ai test:app runs a first-launch test inside the built app with a brand-new profile: the Desiide panel shows in the secondary side bar and the walkthrough opens, with nothing clicked. Before bumping VSCodium, scripts/check-editor-patches.sh <vscode-version> dry-runs our patches against that VS Code release in seconds.

Changing the fork. Desiide's branding and patches live in editor/patches/desiide/ (see its README). The fork has its own history, so a change there takes two commits and two pushes:

# 1. Commit and push inside the fork (branch `desiide`)
git -C editor add patches/desiide
git -C editor commit -m "feat(<ID>): ..."
git -C editor push origin desiide

# 2. Record the new fork commit in this repo
git add editor
git commit -m "feat(<ID>): bump editor"

Push the fork first. Otherwise this repo points at a commit nobody else can fetch.

Freeing disk space. The build leaves about 8.5 GB behind. You can delete it anytime; the next build recreates it:

rm -rf editor/vscode editor/VSCode-*   # ~7 GB: upstream source and the built app
rm -rf ~/.cache/desiide                   # ~1 GB: pinned Node and the build's npm cache

Contributing

Work is organized into modules, each with a brief in roadmap/modules/ that defines its scope and acceptance criteria. A module is built on a mod/<ID>-<slug> branch and merged by PR once the Definition of Done is met and CI is green. Contribution guidelines, a code of conduct, and a security policy will be added before Alpha.

License

Desiide's own code is dual licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option (ADR-013). Upstream VS Code / VSCodium code stays under its MIT license.