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FAQ
The questions that come up most, answered in one place. For problems, see Troubleshooting.
Yes. The editor is free, open source (MIT) and complete: no feature is held back, and it works fully offline with your own provider keys. What will be sold is cloud sync of your profile — your settings, the Pi configuration, skills and memory travelling between machines. See Cloud Sync.
Not necessarily. Pi knows how to connect 41 providers, and 8 of them sign in with a subscription you already pay for (ChatGPT, Claude Pro/Max, Copilot, Grok, Kimi, Meta, OpenRouter, Radius). The rest are key-based, and you can also declare any OpenAI-compatible endpoint with your own base URL. See Pi Inside.
Yes. PiCode itself never needs a server. The agent needs whatever provider you connected — a local model endpoint counts as offline.
Everything is inside the data/ folder next to the executable: user
data, extensions, sessions, the Pi profile and your settings.
Nothing is written to %APPDATA%. Copy data/ and
your whole setup moves; delete it and you get a clean PiCode.
Windows x64 and Linux x64. macOS is refused with an explicit message. ARM targets are not wired yet.
It is built from the VS Code source, rebranded. Extensions install from Open VSX, because the Microsoft Marketplace terms do not license third-party builds to use their gallery. A theme or extension that exists only on the Microsoft Marketplace cannot be installed here.
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Stable (
master) — everyday use, recommended. -
Beta (
beta) — early access to what is coming. -
Experimental (
experimental) — the freshest work, may break.
All three share the same code; each has its own branch and update feed. See Getting PiCode.
The editor checks its channel's update feed and offers the update when one appears. Updates arrive only through GitHub Releases — the in-product updater that would silently replace the editor is disabled by design.
No. PiCode adds no telemetry and no Microsoft service. Your code goes
only to the model provider you connected, which is the normal behaviour
of any AI assistant. Credentials stay in PiCode's own profile;
auth.json is never uploaded.
Open an issue from the repository's Issues tab and pick the right form — a bug, a build failure, a feature request or a question. For anything that could be a security problem, use the private security advisory form instead.
Yes. Every change lands through a pull request — direct pushes to the branches are disabled, including for the maintainer. Start with Building PiCode, then read CONTRIBUTING.md.
- pi is the coding agent: the loop, the tools, the providers.
- Gentle AI is the harness above it: memory, skills, subagents and the review discipline.
- ODD (Organic Driven Development) is Gentle AI's default workflow.
See Pi Inside and Gentle AI and ODD.
Still stuck? Troubleshooting · Open a question