Introducing Stash VSCode and Jetbrains Extensions

In here, Stash, we always build for developers, and we are so happy to announce our new plugins. We created a VSCode extension and a JetBrains plugin. These extensions help you enhance your IDE with Stash AI's context engineering power.

Introducing the Stash VSCode extension

We all know developers love VSCode so much, and they spend a lot of time inside it. So, as we are all developers at Stash, we can emphasize our fellow developer friends. Because of that, we brought Stash's power into VSCode with our brand-new extension.

It has all the features of our web app. Additionally, its interface offers greater ease of use for developers. Also, you do not need to open a new screen beside your IDE. It can analyze your issues and show you where to start solving your tasks. You can find related documents, similar issues, code files, and experts for your assigned issue. Your company codebase context powers itself with Stash. It helps solve your issues on time.

Power your IDE with the Stash JetBrains plug-in

Even a lot of developers use VSCode more in daily life; we don't forget about JetBrains lovers. We also understand them, and we built the Stash JetBrains plugin for you all. It has the same features as the VSCode extension. It offers a simpler UI and is easy to access within your IDE.

You have amazing contextual power at your fingertips. Without leaving your JetBrains IDE, you can solve the hardest issues with the speed of light. Our aim is always to level up the developer experience and productivity. By using our extension and plugin, we can promise you speed and correctness. You can see more about our extensions on our documentation.

How did we build them? A developer story

In Stash, we love sharing building stories, so I want to share one and bring our process closer to you. We love developers. You are our people. Our customers also enjoy new features and stories.

As a founding engineer at Stash, I was excited to get the issues for the VSCode extension and JetBrains plugin. Because as a developer, I knew that people were gonna also love it so much! So, I started with VSCode. Actually, our CTO built the foundation of the app and shared it with me; after that, it was all on me. The UI, frontend part, and all upcoming fixes and improvements.

I felt a bit scared when I started building it. I had never built an extension before in my career. Firstly, I went to the official documentation of VSCode extension API. I found and learned a lot of good stuff from there. I understood the structure and logic of a VSCode extension. Also, I had parts that I don't fully understand but in these parts I got help from my teammates and had great explanations from them.

After lots of effort, with my great teammates, the help of the documents, and deep-dive coding sessions, I handled the task. It was a great experience for me, and it was an amazing feature and product for our team and customers. Moreover, It was also so easy to publish the VSCode extension to the market. We set up Microsoft Azure and then we publish our extension into that set up. Also, we can easily publish new versions with very ease and no headache.

It was also the same excitement for the Jetbrains plugin. But this time it was harder. I had the basics of building plugins or extensions, but I had little experience with Kotlin. Also, we needed to use old UI libraries which are Java Swing and other complicated libraries to build our plugin. Honestly, it is kinda hard to build for Jetbrains products because the UI, libraries and a lot of stuff are outdated or not that usable. Even putting an image into the plugin was very hard and we tried to figure it out for days.

Furthermore, alignment and responsive development are also very hard on that side. You need to check a lot of documents mostly not maintained anymore and so. Luckily, I worked with my teammates and used reliable AI tools and documents. Together, we finished the task and cooked the product once more. But after we finished the product, hardships did not end on the JetBrains side. They have different requirements and a hard acceptance process for new plugins. They either want your plugin open source to publish it into their market or if you don't open source it, the process gets harder and you need to wait approval for months.

Moreover, if we need to talk about whether we can use this extension in Cursor, of course! As long as Cursor is a fork of VSCode, whenever we install something it also gets installed inside Cursor too. And this will give us amazing coding and context power. Because Stash extension is going to provide solid context to users and with Cursor's coding power they will be a great mixture. You will have your context engineer under your hand.

I know you all had that kind of feeling when you built something useful for people. I felt exactly the same and huge satisfaction when we finished them. They were ready to publish and I couldn't stop dreaming about thousands of people using them. In Stash, we work with that mission and vision. I hope everyone likes them. With your valuable feedback, they will evolve every day. You can try here!