Install from VS Code Marketplace →
Dawn is now available directly inside VS Code as a first-party extension.
This is not the MCP path we covered recently. MCP lets other clients — Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot — call Dawn as a server. The VS Code extension is Dawn itself, running as a dedicated chat surface inside the editor. Same workspaces, same agents, same connected sources, but without leaving VS Code.
To be clear: this does not turn Dawn into a coding agent. Dawn is not competing with Copilot or Cursor for code generation. What it does is bring the full knowledge behind your Dawn agents — your Jira tickets, Confluence wikis, Notion docs, repositories, and everything else you have connected — directly into the place where you write code. Instead of configuring a dozen separate MCPs so your editor can talk to your ticketing system, your wiki, and your repositories, you open the Dawn sidebar and ask an agent that already has access to all of it.
Dawn Where You Already Work
Most of the time you spend with code happens inside the editor. Tabbing over to a browser to ask Dawn a question, then tabbing back to act on the answer, works — but it breaks the flow. The extension removes that friction. Open the Dawn sidebar, pick the workspace and agent you want, and start a thread right there.
Your threads in the extension are private to you. They do not show up as shared workspace conversations unless you choose to make them visible. That matters for the kind of quick, exploratory questions people ask while reading code — things you want to ask without broadcasting to the rest of the team.
You can switch between workspaces and agents without leaving the editor, keep multiple threads going, and come back to recent ones later. Files and attachments that Dawn returns are downloadable directly from the sidebar. It works the way you would expect a native editor integration to work.
Getting Started
Install the Dawn extension from the VS Code Marketplace and open the Dawn sidebar. Sign in with your Dawn account or paste a Dawn API credential if you prefer token-based access. Choose the workspace you want to work in, pick an agent, and send your first prompt. The whole setup takes less than a minute if you already have a Dawn account.
If you do not have a Dawn account yet, you can create one from the extension’s sign-in flow. The extension walks you through it.
Working Against Your Current Codebase
This is where the extension becomes more useful than a browser tab.
When your VS Code workspace is trusted, the Dawn extension can expose the codebase you have open to the active run. That means Dawn can read files, search for symbols, and navigate the project structure without you needing to paste code into the conversation or set up a repository connection first.
Prompts that benefit from this are the ones that reference code you are already looking at. Explain this file. Find where this function is called. Compare these two implementations. Search the workspace for references to this API. These work because Dawn can see the same files you see in the editor, not because it is pulling from a remote source.
This is complementary to connected sources, not a replacement. If you have repositories linked in your Dawn workspace, Dawn can still search those. The trusted workspace access adds the local, in-editor codebase on top of what is already connected. For code you are actively working on — branches not yet pushed, local experiments, files you just created — that local access is the only way Dawn can see them.
Private Threads by Default
Threads you start in the extension are private to you. They are your conversations with the agent, visible in your extension sidebar and in Dawn Web under your account, but they do not appear in the shared workspace conversation view.
That is a deliberate choice. The kind of questions people ask while coding tend to be fast, informal, and sometimes experimental. You might ask an agent to explain a pattern you are unfamiliar with, or to draft a quick implementation you are not sure about yet. Those threads do not need to be shared with the whole workspace.
If you want to share a thread or escalate a conversation, you can still do that through Dawn Web. The extension does not lock threads into a private-only state — it just defaults to private because that is what makes sense for editor-based workflows.
How This Relates to MCP
The extension and MCP serve different purposes, and both can be active at the same time.
Use the extension when you want Dawn as a chat surface inside VS Code. You interact with Dawn directly — choosing workspaces, agents, and threads the same way you would in Dawn Web, just inside the editor instead.
Use MCP when you want another tool to call Dawn. Codex uses MCP to ask Dawn questions from the terminal. Cursor and GitHub Copilot use MCP to route prompts through Dawn’s agents and connected sources. In that setup, Dawn is the server, and the other tool is the client.
A developer could have both running at the same time — the Dawn extension open in the sidebar for direct conversations, and Dawn MCP configured so that Copilot can also reach Dawn’s agents. They do not conflict.
Getting Started
The setup guide and screenshots are in the docs: