BringYourAI: Connect VSCode to ChatGPT

BringYourAI is the essential bridge between your IDE and the web, finally making it practical to use any AI chat website as your primary coding assistant.

Forget tedious copy-pasting. A simple "@"-command lets you instantly inject any codebase context directly into the conversation, transforming any AI website into a seamless extension of your IDE.

Hand-pick only the most relevant context and get the best possible answer. Attach your local codebase (files, folders, snippets, file trees, problems), external knowledge (browser tabs, GitHub repos, library docs), and your own custom rules.

Why not just use IDE agents (like Cursor, Copilot, or Windsurf)?

IDE agents promote "vibe-coding." They are heavyweight, black-box tools that try to do everything for you, but this approach inevitably collapses. On any complex project, agents get lost. In a desperate attempt to understand your codebase, they start making endless, slow and expensive tool calls to read your files. Armed with this incomplete picture, they then try to change too much at once, introducing difficult-to-debug bugs and making your own codebase feel increasingly unfamiliar.

BringYourAI is different by design. It's a lightweight, non-agentic, non-invasive tool built on a simple principle: You are the expert on your code.

You know exactly what context the AI needs and you are the best person to verify its suggestions. Therefore, BringYourAI doesn't guess at context, and it never makes unsupervised changes to your code.

This tool isn't for everyone. If your AI agent already works great on your projects, or you prefer a hands-off, "vibe-coding" approach where you don't need to understand the code, then you've already found your workflow.

AI will likely be capable of full autonomy on any project someday, but it’s definitely not there yet.

Since this workflow doesn't rely on agentic features inside the IDE, the only tool it requires is a chat. This means you're free to use any AI chat on the web.

Then why not just use the built-in IDE chat (like Cursor, Copilot or Windsurf)?

There's a simple reason developers stick to IDE chats: sharing codebase context with a website has always been a nightmare. BringYourAI solves this fundamental problem. Now that AI chat websites can finally be considered a primary coding assistant, we can look at their powerful, often-overlooked advantages:

1. Dramatically better usage limits

Dedicated IDE subscriptions are often far more restrictive. With web chats, you get dramatically more for your money from the plans you might already have. Let's compare the total messages you get in a month with top-tier models on different subscriptions:

• Cursor Pro ($20): 500 o3 messages (based on the old Pro plan, as the rate limits for the new one are somewhat unclear).

• Windsurf Pro ($15): 500 o3 messages.

• GitHub Copilot Pro ($10): 900 o4-mini messages (Pro plan does not include o3).

Now, compare that to a single ChatGPT Plus subscription:

• ChatGPT Plus ($20): A massive, flexible pool including 600 o3 + 3000 o4-mini-high + 9000 o4-mini-medium + 25 deep research + essentially unlimited 4.1 or 4o messages.

The value is clear. This isn't just about getting slightly more. It's a fundamentally different tier of access. You can code with the best models without constantly worrying about restrictive limits, all while maximizing a subscription you likely already pay for.

2. Don't pay for what's free

Some models locked behind a paywall in your IDE are available for free on the web. The best current example is Gemini 2.5 Pro: while IDEs bundle it into their paid plans, Google AI Studio provides essentially unlimited access for free. BringYourAI lets you take advantage of these incredible offers.

3. Continue using the web features you love

With BringYourAI, you can continue using the polished, powerful features of the web interfaces that embedded IDE chats often lack or poorly imitate, such as: web search, chat histories, memory, projects, canvas, attachments, voice input, rules, code execution, thinking tools, thinking budgets, deep research and more.

4. The user interface

While UI ultimately comes down to personal taste, many find the official web platforms offer a cleaner, more intuitive experience than the custom IDE chat windows.

Then why not just use MCP?

First, not every AI chat website supports MCP. And even when one does, it still requires a chain of slow and expensive tool calls to first find the appropriate files and then read them. As the expert on your code, you already know what context the AI needs for any given question and can provide it directly, using BringYourAI, in a matter of seconds. In this type of workflow, getting context with MCP is actually a detour and not a shortcut.