LessVibes release

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fuck the claw

lessvibes

lessvibes is an early JetBrains plugin project aimed at a pretty specific problem in the AI coding era: code can appear in your project faster than you can really read it.

The point of lessvibes is not to block AI tools or shame anyone for using them. The point is to make AI-assisted coding more visible and more hands-on. The plugin is meant to notice when a burst of code lands, track whether the affected files were actually opened, and help the developer step through a likely code path instead of just trusting the vibes and moving on.

In its current form, the project is focused on PyCharm first. The rough direction is:

  • track likely assisted or bulk-generated changes
  • show which files were touched
  • show which of those files were never opened
  • show which files were opened but never really edited
  • give the user a way to open a bounded left-to-right code-flow view

The project lives here:

https://github.com/nigeldaniels/lessvibes

Installing It In PyCharm

Right now, the simplest way to install lessvibes is from a locally built plugin zip.

  1. Clone the repo.
  2. From the project root, run:
./gradlew buildPlugin
  1. That produces a plugin archive at:
build/distributions/lessvibes-0.1.0.zip
  1. In PyCharm, open:
Settings / Preferences -> Plugins -> gear icon -> Install Plugin from Disk...
  1. Select the generated zip file.
  2. Restart the IDE if PyCharm asks.

After restart, the plugin should appear as the lessvibes tool window.

Installing It In Similar JetBrains IDEs

Because lessvibes is a JetBrains plugin, it may also load in similar IntelliJ-platform IDEs. That said, this project is being built with PyCharm in mind first, so anything outside PyCharm should be treated as experimental for now.

The install flow is basically the same:

  1. Build the plugin zip with ./gradlew buildPlugin
  2. Open the target JetBrains IDE
  3. Use Install Plugin from Disk...
  4. Pick the generated zip
  5. Restart the IDE

Important Warning

This project is still very much a work in progress.

It is mostly untested, the heuristics are still rough, and the code-flow logic is best-effort rather than guaranteed runtime truth. If you try it today, you should expect edges, gaps, and wrong guesses.

That said, the idea is real, the first plugin scaffold exists, and contributions are absolutely welcome.

If this problem sounds interesting to you, open an issue, send a PR, or just poke around the code here:

https://github.com/nigeldaniels/lessvibes

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