I built Arceus: A fully local, offline alternative to Cursor/Copilot for VS Code (Powered by Ollama
Hey everyone! 👋
I'm excited to share a project I've been working on called Arceus. It's a premium, fully local AI coding assistant for VS Code that runs entirely on your own hardware using Ollama.
If you're tired of paying subscriptions for AI coding tools or worried about sending your proprietary codebase to cloud servers (telemetry, privacy risks, etc.), I built this for you. Your code never leaves your machine.
✨ Key Features:
- 100% Local & Private: No API keys, no telemetry, no cloud. Works completely offline.
- Workspace Semantic Search: It doesn't just read the active file. It uses
nomic-embed-textto index your workspace locally, so you can ask broad architectural questions and it finds the relevant context. - Smart
@Mentions: Just type@in the chat to instantly search and inject full files into the model's context. - Automatic File Creation & Editing: Ask it to create a new component or file, and it will generate the code, create the file in your workspace, and explain how it works—hands-free.
- DeepSeek Reasoning Support: If you use models like
deepseek-r1, Arceus isolates the model's<think>tags and streams the cognitive process in a beautiful UI so you can see how it solved the problem before the code is generated. - Dedicated Modes: Switch easily between Explain, Review, or Debug depending on what you need help with.
🚀 How to get started (3 simple steps):
- Install Ollama: Get it from ollama.com if you haven't already.
- Pull the models: Open your terminal and run:
- Install Arceus: Search for "Arceus" in the VS Code Extensions Marketplace (or download the
.vsixfrom the repo), install it, click the icon in the sidebar, and start chatting!
🛠️ Customization: You can easily change models, context window size, and keep-alive times in the VS Code settings (Ctrl+, -> search "Arceus").
I'd absolutely love for you guys to try it out, try breaking it, and let me know what you think! Any feedback on the UI, the semantic search quality, or feature requests would be massively appreciated.
Repo Link: GitHub - AbhijithBabu12/Arceus-Ai
Please check it out, give it a spin, and let me know if you have any questions in the comments! 👇