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What PiCode Is
PiCode is a distribution of the editor, not a plugin for it. It takes the MIT-licensed VS Code source, builds it the way VSCodium builds it (minus the Microsoft branding and telemetry), and integrates an agent — Pi — as the editor's own chat participant, with Gentle AI as the workflow harness on top.
You download PiCode, open it, and the agentic environment is already there: the
chat in the editor says @pi, the model is connected from settings with your
subscription or an API key, your skills and memory live inside the editor's
own profile, and nothing you do touches a Microsoft service. It is portable —
the whole state lives in a data/ folder beside the executable — and it is
free and complete: the paid part of the plan is cloud sync of that folder,
never a feature lock.
| Extension-based setups | PiCode | |
|---|---|---|
| The agent surface | a webview panel bolted on | the editor's own Chat, with @pi as the default participant |
| The runtime | whatever is on your PATH, unpinned |
Pi pinned by the distribution, installed and updated from inside the editor |
| Configuration | spread across machine profiles | one PiCode profile (data/), self-contained, nothing written outside it |
| Copilot | disabled, still shipping in the bundle | product keys deleted from the build, and its strings patched out |
| Updates to the core | you cannot touch them | you compile the core yourself from the pinned source plus auditable patches |
- Not a new editor. Everything not related to the agent stays stock VS Code behaviour. PiCode changes identity, removes what it promises to remove, and adds the agent layer.
- Not a fork to maintain. The core is a pinned upstream commit plus two numbered patch sets. When the pin moves, the patches are re-applied — that is the whole merge story (why).
- Not a reimplementation of Pi or Gentle AI. Provider OAuth, the model catalog, skills, memory — Pi and Gentle AI already ship them. The work is showing them inside the editor surfaces, and that rule is enforced (why).
- Not a cloud product. It works fully offline against your own provider keys. Cloud profile sync is a planned paid service; the local product will not be trimmed to sell it.
- Host — the agent that executes: Pi. PiCode has an internal one and can optionally connect to an external one.
- Harness — the layer that organizes work above the host: Gentle AI.
- Pin — the exact upstream commit/version PiCode is built and verified against.
-
Delta — the JSON file that describes every change to the product
(
distribution/product-delta.json).
Full list: Glossary.
Next: Getting PiCode · Architecture