Agent Helper Kit

Agent Helper Kit is a VS Code extension for developers who want faster AI-assisted workflows inside the editor.

It focuses on two practical jobs:

• Move code review comments into chat with file/line context.
• Provide reliable shell tools for agent workflows that need command status and structured output.

Features

Bring review comments to chat

Select code comments, e.g. from Copilot Code Review or CodeRabbit, to format and include them in the chat context, with source location context.

By default, each Copy to Chat click sends that review comment straight into chat history. If you prefer batching, enable agent-helper-kit.bringToChat.queueBeforeSend to enqueue the comments. When ready, call up the chat participant @bringCommentsToChat (should be already prefilled) and all enqueued comments are then brought in.

• Command: Copy to Chat (agent-helper-kit.reviewCommentToChat)
• Chat participant: @bringCommentsToChat (agent-helper-kit.bringCommentsToChat)

Agent-friendly shell tools

Compared with built-in terminal tools, these extension tools are optimized for agent workflows.

Benefits:

• Deterministic command lifecycle with stable IDs you can await, poll, and kill.
• Structured metadata (exitCode, terminationSignal, timedOut, shell) that is easier to automate against.
• Output controls (full_output, last_lines, regex) to reduce context noise in chat.
• run_in_sync_shell is optimal for single- or multi-step deterministic commands.
• run_in_async_shell is optimal for long-running detached jobs plus explicit polling.

Tradeoffs:

• No interactive terminal session (these are command-execution APIs, not full terminal UIs).
• No state/environment persistence between command runs, each command runs in a fresh shell instance.

Recommendation: for development flows where most or all commands are non-interactive and require no environment state persistency, you can disable the built-in terminal tools.

Configuration

• agent-helper-kit.bringToChat.enabled: enable or disable bring-to-chat actions.
• agent-helper-kit.bringToChat.queueBeforeSend: queue comments and bring-all-to-chat flow instead of immediate send on each click.
• agent-helper-kit.shellTools.enabled: enable or disable shell tool registration.
• agent-helper-kit.shellTools.autoApprove.enabled: allow shell tools to skip confirmation only for commands that pass the built-in and user-configured auto-approval policy.
• agent-helper-kit.shellTools.autoApprove.warningAccepted: second opt-in gate for shell tool auto-approval after you review the risk of model-triggered shell execution.
• agent-helper-kit.shellTools.autoApprove.rules: override shell tool auto-approval rules with per-command or regex-based allow and deny entries.
• agent-helper-kit.shellOutput.inMemoryOutputLimitKiB: KiB of shell output to keep in memory before immediately spilling to a temp file. Set to 0 to disable the size-based spill threshold.
• agent-helper-kit.shellOutput.memoryToFileSpillMinutes: minutes to keep output in memory before spilling to file.
• agent-helper-kit.shellOutput.startupPurgeMaxAgeHours: startup cleanup threshold for old persisted output.

Contributing

• Use Node.js 22.13+ or 24+ for local development.
• Open a ticket for bug reports, questions, and feature suggestions.
• Pull requests are welcome for fixes and improvements.
• Before opening a PR, run yarn lint:check and yarn test.

License

MIT - see LICENSE.