An agentic code editor with its own AI inside — not an assistant you install afterwards.
Open it, sign in, and the agent already knows your providers, your memory and your skills. No setup ceremony, no Copilot.
The editor is free and complete. No local feature is held back and it is 100% open source. It needs no account: bring your own provider keys or subscriptions. The only paid thing is the optional cloud sync of your setup (see PiCode Account below).
Versions. PiCode's own version (the badge above; -beta and -experimental on the pre-release channels) is the one you are offered. The editor reports 1.144.x so extensions that require engines.vscode: ^1.144.0 keep installing, while the source tree descends from VS Code 1.135.0. Both numbers live in product.json; the reasoning is in ADR-016.
✨ What you get
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| 💬 AI chat, built in | An agentic assistant that lives in the editor: streaming answers, tools, reasoning, your project's context. It reads your code, edits files, runs commands — and asks before it does. |
| 🔌 Your AI providers | Connect with an API key or an OAuth subscription (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok, Kimi, Meta, OpenRouter…), or declare a compatible endpoint with your own base URL. Pick the model per conversation. |
| 🚀 First-run setup | A window of its own, before the editor: it speaks your computer's language, and while you go through it PiCode already downloads that language for the editor. Choose how you want to work (Agent or Editor), which pi answers (the built-in one or yours), connect a provider, pick a theme, decide a few extras — and, if you want, leave your PiCode account sign-in requested. Nothing opens until you finish or skip it, and PiCode: Setup reopens the same window later. |
| 🤖 Two ways to work: Agent or Editor | Editor is the VS Code you know. Agent rearranges the same editor around the conversation: your sessions on the left, the chat in the middle, and a review bar on the right — files, search, source control and the terminal one tab away. Switch any time with the robot button at the top right, no restart. |
| 🧭 A status column, always at hand | In Agent, the right bar splits in two when there is room: Status next to the chat and the files beside it; narrower, Status is just another tab. It shows where the agent works, how full its context is, your MCP servers, what changed (lines added and removed — click it and every changed file opens in one tab with its diff), the tasks the chat has out and what your memory holds. |
| 🌍 13 languages | The editor, the setup window and everything PiCode adds are translated into Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Turkish and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional). The setup picks yours from your computer and gets its language pack ready. |
| 🎨 Themes | Every card in the setup is painted in the theme's own colours, so the choice is what you see. More themes are installed as extensions, from the editor. |
| 🧩 MCP servers, in one place | Your agent's external tools live in one screen: add a server, edit it, switch it off or remove it. pi calls them through the editor, so its confirmations and permissions apply — you are asked before one of their tools runs. |
☁️ PiCode Account
Create a free account, and add Pro when you want your editor the same
everywhere:
- Settings, extensions and AI configuration — synced and encrypted.
- Your agent's memory and skills — the setup that took hours, kept.
- Last week of conversations — always with you, a rolling window that cleans itself.
- Three ways in — email, Google or GitHub.
The account is free and links your editor to it. Cloud sync is a Pro
feature: the free plan stores nothing. See plans.
⬇️ Download
Grab the latest release from GitHub Releases — the installer (PiCode-win32-x64-…-setup.exe) or a portable zip: unzip, run PiCode.exe. Windows only today.
Three channels share the same code, each on its own branch of this repo: stable (recommended, no suffix), beta (-beta, early access to what is coming) and experimental (-experimental, built from the freshest work). Each has its own update feed, so switching channels is switching branches — choose a channel.
🔏 Code signing policy
Windows builds are signed with a free certificate: Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.
- Only official builds are signed. Every release is built from this repository by GitHub Actions and signed from that same run; nothing built on a personal machine is signed.
- Team roles. Tomás Platero is the author, reviewer and approver of every signing request.
- Privacy. PiCode only talks to other systems when asked: it checks
getpicode.app for updates, signs in to your PiCode Account, syncs your settings if you have Pro, and sends prompts to the AI providers you configure. Nothing else leaves your computer. See the privacy policy.
🛠️ Building from source
One clone has everything — the editor's source is versioned here, with the product identity already applied. The build is a five-phase chain that finishes in minutes on a steady state:
prepare → connector → compile → pack → stage
./build/build.sh # full build, dependencies installed once
./build/build.sh -o # fast correctness check — nothing installed or compiled
Prefer buttons? build/build-window.cmd opens a small window that drives the same pipeline. Full dependency list and troubleshooting in the Contributing docs, the build guide and howto-build.
Releases are built and published by GitHub Actions: bump the version in product.json, tag v<version>, push — the release workflow builds, publishes the release with its SHA-256, generates the update feed and verifies it live. The version rule is the one above: a release moves the editor's number too (its patch, or the base when upstream moves) — because the updater compares the editor's number. The tag, the release title and the zip carry PiCode's version. Details in docs/CI.md.
🙏 Credits
PiCode stands on open source: VSCodium / VS Code — MIT source for the editor, the Pi coding agent for the agentic loop, and Gentle AI with its Engram memory — both MIT, by Gentleman Programming — for the method, the subagents and the memory. Thank you. Full attribution in docs/DISTRIBUTION.md. PiCode is an independent project.
Made by Tomás Platero
