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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. The paid part is cloud sync (Pro) of your profile — your settings, extensions and the Pi configuration travelling between machines. The account itself is free. See Cloud Sync.
Not necessarily. Pi knows how to connect dozens of 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 only today. Linux, macOS and ARM are not supported.
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.
-
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. Small fixes arrive as a small, verified download; see Updates and Hotfixes. Nothing is ever replaced without you restarting.
Yes: Engram, built in, keeps what matters between conversations. Its store is
~/.engram on your machine, shared with other agents that use Engram. See
Gentle AI and ODD.
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. The only other traffic is the update check,
signing in to your PiCode Account, and cloud sync if you have Pro.
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: skills, subagents and the review discipline, with Engram as its memory.
- ODD (Organic Driven Development) is Gentle AI's default workflow.
See Pi Inside and Gentle AI and ODD.
With the robot button at the top right, Settings → Workbench → Appearance, or PiCode: Switch Layout (Agent / Editor) in the Command Palette. It changes at once and nothing restarts. Editor is the VS Code you know; Agent puts your sessions on the left, the chat in the middle and a review bar on the right. See Two Ways of Working.
Command Palette → Configure Display Language, pick one of the 13 (or English) and restart. The first-run setup already does it for your computer's language. See Languages.
In the Agent layout it is the column next to the chat that shows where the agent works, how full its context is, your MCP servers, the lines you changed, its tasks and what your memory holds. It is a column when the right bar is wide and a tab when it is narrow — never both.
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