EditVolt Chat

Open the Assistant from the activity bar, or run EditVolt Assistant: Focus on Chat View from the Command Palette. Every conversation runs in one of six modes — pick how much autonomy you want from the mode chip in the composer, or cycle them with ⇧Tab.

Mode	What it does	Touches your files?
Ask	Questions and explanations, with grounded retrieval	Never
Plan	Designs an approach step by step	Only after you approve
Debug	Evidence-first loop — hypothesize, instrument, reproduce, fix, clean up	Staged diffs you approve
Agent	Executes tasks end to end with tools (the default)	Staged diffs you approve
Design	Agent plus a live in-editor browser it can see and drive	Staged diffs you approve
Multitask	Decomposes the request into 2–6 subtasks and runs them as parallel workers	One consolidated review

Ask and Plan are read-only by design — nothing changes until you explicitly approve.

Set the mode a new conversation starts in with product.modes.default (default agent).

@-mention context

Type @ in the composer to open the context picker. The categories are:

Category	What it pins
Files & Folders	Search and pin files or folders from the workspace
Workspace	Hybrid semantic + keyword search over the repo before sending
Symbol	A workspace symbol's definition
Commit (Diff of Working State)	Your current Git working-tree diff vs HEAD
Branch (Diff with Main)	Commits on your branch since diverging from main
Git Ref (Diff vs)	Any branch or tag as the diff base
Commit (Diff vs)	A commit SHA to diff against HEAD
Pull Request (Diff)	An open GitHub PR, via the gh CLI
Problems	Editor diagnostics — errors and warnings
Docs	Your indexed documentation library, or a pinned URL
Past Chats	A previous conversation's transcript
Terminals	An open terminal's recent output
Browser (Fetch)	Lets the turn fetch live web pages and URLs
Browser	Browser tools — inspect elements, console logs, network traffic (needs product.browser.enabled)
Memory	Search persistent EditVolt memory
Skills	Run a workspace skill from .editvolt/skills

You can also paste, drag, or attach images — vision works across all connected providers. Attachment size limits are configurable (product.composer.attach.imageMaxMb, …ipynbMaxMb, …referencedFileMaxMb).

The base branch used by Branch (Diff with Main) is product.context.changesBaseBranch (default main).

Reasoning effort and output style

Two composer-level controls shape the answer:

• Effort (product.reasoning.effort, default medium) — how hard the model thinks. auto also serves medium; low and high pin a level across turns.
• Output style (product.assistant.outputStyle, default default) — concise, explanatory, or structured.

Dictation

Press ⌘⇧Space to dictate into the composer. Speech-to-text runs through Chromium's engine or a local Whisper binary (product.voice.sttEngine: auto | chromium | whisper). Set product.voice.autoSubmit to send automatically when you say one of your product.voice.submitKeywords. Turn the whole feature off with product.voice.enabled.

Reviewing what the AI did

Every agent edit is staged as a diff, never auto-applied. Use Review My Changes for a unified multi-file diff, and checkpoints to roll the workspace back to any earlier point in the conversation.

Related settings: product.edits.inlinePreview (inline diff preview, on), product.edits.formatOnApply (on), product.chat.editResend.confirm (confirm before re-sending an edit, on).

Slash commands

Type / in the composer, or run EditVolt: Slash Command from the palette:

Command	What it does
/explain	Explain the current selection or file (reasoning-heavy)
/fix	Fix the diagnostics on the current selection; returns a unified diff
/test	Generate a test using the detected test framework
/review	Best-practice scan of the current file
/architect	Architecture-level reasoning, ADR-lite (Context / Decision / Consequences)
/why	Workspace-grounded investigation of "why is X?"
/debug	Switch to Debug mode and run the evidence-first loop
/delegate	Kick off a parallel subagent — presets: explore, agent, shell, review, debug-repro, ci-investigator

Each command is also its own palette entry, so you can bind it to a key. You can add your own — see Customization.