ChatGPT extension for VSCode

This Visual Studio Code extension allows you to use the unofficial ChatGPT API to generate natural language responses from OpenAI's ChatGPT to your questions, right within the editor.

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💥 Due to breaking changes in ChatGPT on Dec 12., update the extension and read the new instructions on obtaining the tokens!

Features

• Ask general questions or use code snippets from the editor to query ChatGPT via an input box in the sidebar
• Right click on a code selection and run one of the context menu shortcuts
• View ChatGPT's responses in a panel next to the editor
• Ask follow-up questions to the response (conversation context is maintained)
• Insert code snippets from the AI's response into the active editor by clicking on them

Installation

To use this extension, install it from the VSCode marketplace or download and install .vsix file from Releases.

1. After the installation is complete, you will need to add your ChatGPT tokens to the extension settings in VSCode. To do this, open the Settings panel by going to the Code menu and selecting Preferences, then Settings.
2. In the search bar, type ChatGPT to filter the settings list.
3. In the ChatGPT section, enter your session tokens in the top three field

After completing these steps, the extension should be ready to use.

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Obtaining the three tokens

To use this extension, you will need to authenticate with valid token sfrom ChatGPT. To get a session token:

1. Go to https://chat.openai.com/chat and log in or sign up.
2. Open the developer tools in your browser (preferably not Chrome, see below).
3. Go to the Application tab and open the Cookies section.
4. Copy the value for __Secure-next-auth.session-token and paste it into the Session Token field in the extension settings, and the value for cf_clearance into the Clearance Token field.
5. Go to the Network tab and select any request.
6. Copy the value for user-agent from the Request Headers and paste it into the User Agent field in the extension settings (it should look something like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/108.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/108.0.1462.46)
7. Alternatively, type navigator.userAgent in the Console tab and copy the result without the quotes.

Update December 12, 2022

Yesterday, OpenAI added additional Cloudflare protections that make it more difficult to access the unofficial API. That's why you now need to set three different parameters instead of just the Session Token. There are also several limitations now (copied from chatgpt-api):

• Cloudflare cf_clearance tokens expire after 2 hours, so right now we recommend that you refresh your cf_clearance token every ~45 minutes or so.
• Your user-agent and IP address must match from the real browser window you're logged in with to the one you're using for ChatGPTAPI.
• You must use node >= 18. Type node -v in the terminal to check you version.
• You should not be using this account while the extension is using it, because that browser window may refresh one of your tokens and invalidate the extension's session.
• There are currently users who have issues even when following all of the above (see this comment). If you're using Chrome to obtain the tokens, try using a different browser (e.g. Brave), as it seems like using Chrome is often the cause of this.

Using the Extension

To use the extension, open a text editor in Visual Studio Code and open the ChatGPT panel by clicking on the ChatGPT icon in the sidebar. This will open a panel with an input field where you can enter your prompt or question. By clicking enter, it will be sent to ChatGPT. Its response will be displayed below the input field in the sidebar (note that it may take some time for it to be calculated).

You can also select a code snippet in the editor and then enter a prompt in the side panel, or right-click and select "Ask ChatGPT". The selected code will be automatically appended to your query when it is sent to the AI. This can be useful for generating code snippets or getting explanations for specific pieces of code.

To insert a code snippet from the AI's response into the editor, simply click on the code block in the panel. The code will be automatically inserted at the cursor position in the active editor.

You can select some code in the editor, right click on it and choose one of the following shortcuts from the context menu:

Commands:

• Ask ChatGPT: will provide a prompt for you to enter any query
• ChatGPT: Explain selection: will explain what the selected code does
• ChatGPT: Refactor selection: will try to refactor the selected code
• ChatGPT: Find problems: looks for problems/errors in the selected code, fixes and explains them
• ChatGPT: Optimize selection: tries to optimize the selected code

Ask ChatGPT is also available when nothing is selected. For the other four commands, you can customize the exact prompt that will be sent to the AI by editing the extension settings in VSCode Preferences.

Because ChatGPT is a conversational AI, you can ask follow-up questions to the response. The conversation context is maintained between queries, so you can ask multiple questions in a row. To reset the conversation context, click ctrl+shift+p and select ChatGPT: Reset Conversation.

Common issues

• ERROR 403 forbidden: Make sure you exactly followed these instruction on obtaining the tokens. If you still get this error, check wheteher your node version is >= 18. Otherwise check this list for other potential issues caused by OpenAI's use of CloudFlare. If you're using Chrome to obtain the tokens, try using a different browser (e.g. Brave), as it seems like using Chrome is often the cause of the issues. Some users still seem to have issues with this even when following the instructions (see here and here for potential causes)
• ERROR 429 too many requests: This can be solved by using ctrl+shift+p and selecting ChatGPT: Reset Conversation (but it will also delete the current conversation context). It can be caused by sending requests too quickly, but also when the previous request timeouted. If it keeps happening try increasing the timeout in the extension settings. Also it looks like OpenAI now sends a timeout after about a minute which also causes this when it happens (see this), I am currently trying to find a way to fix this.

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Please note that this extension is currently a proof of concept and may have some limitations or bugs. We welcome feedback and contributions to improve the extension.

Credits

• This wouldn't be possible without OpenAI's ChatGPT
• The extension makes use of chatgpt-api (by Travis Fischer), which uses ChatGPT unofficial API in order to login and communicate with it.
• It is built on top of mpociot/chatgpt-vscode, which started this project
• v0.3 inspired and based on barnesoir/chatgpt-vscode-plugin and gencay/vscode-chatgpt