A VS Code extension that proves you can get most (if not all) of the features of mainstream extensions while being size efficient and having a good design.
Arc packs pretty much all you can ask for into 0.22 MB. That's smaller than a single high-res screenshot. For context (as of today, June 29th), Cline is 10.18 MB, Roo Code 30.11 MB, Kilo Code 101.40 MB, Continue 111.48 MB. Arc uses TypeScript and fully utilises VS Code's built-in APIs.
Features:
Important ones:
Tiered model registry (free/light/default/heavy). Start a chat with a default model, and watch it start subagents using free models for simple tasks, or handoff the entire chat to a heavy model for difficult tasks. 23 providers + a generic OpenAI-compt. endpoint are there by default with multi-provider failover and weighted load balancing, allowing you to configure multiple providers for the same model and automatically switch between them when one is down/out of credits.
Not so important ones:
subagents, dynamic chat compaction (calculated from thinking and response avgs.), file-specific checkpoints (only tracks changed files), mcp support, semantic search, sandboxed shells, memory, text-only fallback (use multimodal models to generate descs. for images when sent to a text-only model), etc.
Featuren't:
TUI/CLI/Remote access? We believe agents are tools, not replacements. You should always be accountable for the quality and check the code yourself.
Model routing/Cloud features? We broke.
Slash commands/@-commands? You're using a GUI. Use the buttons.
Autocomplete? Inline LLM completions tend to be sluggish and (usually) mediocre, at least from my experience.
Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=khrotu.arc-code
GitHub: https://github.com/KHROTU/arc
Demo: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/fa8d9d15-870f-49e2-b1ea-4ed57678483f
