dougs

Posted on Mar 18

Vibe Coding in Parallel Was Chaos—So I Built Agent Buddy for VS Code

#ai #productivity #vscode #devtools

I Built a Tiny AI Buddy

👉 Agent Buddy on the VS Code Marketplace

When you run multiple AI coding sessions at once, context switching gets expensive.

I kept finding myself asking:

Which session is actively editing?
Which one is stuck thinking?
Did that terminal run finish?
Is this session healthy or silently failing?

So I built a small VS Code extension: Agent Buddy — an animated sidebar companion that reacts to coding activity in real time.

It’s basically a status dashboard disguised as a character.

And honestly? It makes long, text-heavy vibe coding sessions feel lighter.

Why I built it

Two reasons:

Parallel AI sessions need fast visual feedback
- I often have several AI workflows running in parallel.
- Reading logs or scanning text for each session is slow.
- I wanted an at-a-glance signal for “what’s happening now.”
Vibe coding can be textually intense
- Constant walls of text are mentally fatiguing.
- A simple visual layer breaks that up.
- It turns monitoring from “reading everything” into “glancing and deciding.”

What Agent Buddy does

Agent Buddy lives in the VS Code Activity Bar and updates based on editor behavior.

It reacts to 9 states:

idle
thinking
planning
searching
editing
terminal
success
error
sleeping

Each state has its own color, expression, and animation profile.

So instead of parsing status from text, I can infer state instantly:

green + energetic = good
red + alert = fix now
low activity = waiting or idle

All 9 states in order: idle, thinking, planning, searching, editing, terminal, success, error, sleeping.

How it works (high level)

Built as a VS Code extension with a custom webview panel.
Extension listens to workspace/editor signals (edits, diagnostics, terminal, etc.).
Signals map to a small state machine.
Webview receives state updates and animates the buddy in SVG/CSS.
Includes an inactivity timeout that moves to sleeping.

I also added a screenshot generation flow so docs/marketplace assets stay aligned with actual states.

Unexpected benefit

I originally built this for utility, but it also improved flow.

The UI gives me:

less cognitive load
faster context recovery after interruptions
a little emotional pacing during long coding runs

It sounds small, but in long sessions the difference is real.

If you’re building with AI a lot

If your workflow is mostly text and you’re juggling multiple agents, add one visual signal layer.

It doesn’t have to be a character.
It can be dots, bars, badges, whatever.

The key is this:

Use visuals to compress status, so your brain can spend cycles on decisions instead of parsing.

What I’d add next

Per-workspace buddy instances
Session labels for parallel agent runs
Optional compact mode
Better metrics around task duration and success/error ratios

Try Agent Buddy

If you want to install it and use it in your own workflow, grab it from the VS Code Marketplace: