Every time I got stuck on a bug, the workflow was the same: leave VS Code, open a browser, dig through a Discord with four hundred channels or a forum thread from 2016, ask the question, wait, alt-tab back. The context switch was the tax. So I built the thing I kept wishing existed: a chat network that lives in the VS Code sidebar.
It's called SideChannel, and it launched on the Marketplace this week.
What it is
One public network of developers — not a tool for spinning up private servers. You sign in with GitHub (the same login VS Code already has), and you're in thirteen channels with everybody else: #help, #show-your-work, stack channels, #general. Presence, threads, reactions, DMs, pins — the normal furniture, but code-native:
Share my error — paste a stack trace and it strips secrets (keys, tokens, passwords) before posting.
Insert at cursor — when someone posts a fix, you can drop it straight into your file at your cursor. No copy, alt-tab, paste, re-indent.
Solved, not liked — in #help, the asker marks the answer that fixed it. The solver gets +10 rep. Rep on SideChannel is a count of problems you actually solved, not a popularity score.
Screenshots paste straight into chat, because half of debugging is "look at this."
!The SideChannel channel directory inside VS Code
Why a cap?
The network is capped at 26 accounts right now — me plus 25. That's Wave 1 of a Founding 100 rollout. I'd rather have 25 people in a room that feels alive than 2,500 signups talking to nobody. Founders get a permanent badge and +50 rep, and when a wave fills, the cap goes up for the next one. Public launch is October 27.
The stack, for the curious
TypeScript end to end. The extension is a webview client; the server is a small Node service with WebSockets and SQLite on a single VPS. No venture anything — it costs about seven dollars a month to run, which is exactly how I want it.
Get in
Install it from the Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SideChannel.sidechannel — or search "SideChannel" in the Extensions view. Sign in with GitHub and you're on the board. Come say hello in #introductions, and bring the bug that's been blocking you. That's what #help is for.
— Andrew