I built Forger, a standalone Electron app that bundles a file
explorer, Monaco editor, AI chat, Git, and a real TTY terminal into one
window — with an agent loop that lists, reads, searches, and edits
files across multiple steps, all behind approval dialogs.
Repo: [https://github.com/cuculhart/forger-ide](https://github.com/cuculhart/forger-ide)
Setup guide: [https://cuculhart.com/forger-howto.en.html](https://cuculhart.com/forger-howto.en.html)
Not a VS Code fork, not an extension — a single exe.
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Why I built it
Doing contract work, I kept hitting the same walls:
Confidential code can't go to vendor clouds. In contract work you handle code and engineering knowledge that simply may not pass through someone else's servers. #
Orgs that can't approve $20/mo subscriptions. There are still plenty of organizations where a monthly AI IDE subscription is a hard sell. #
VS Code extension agents get tangled. Extensions are convenient, but they also collide with each other — Copilot interference being the usual suspect. #
Unapproved rewrites are a review burden. When the AI silently rewrites code, the human reviewer pays the cognitive cost. So every write, diff edit, and command goes through an approval dialog, and checkpoint/rollback undoes only the AI's changes. #
Docker-in-Docker tools are heavy. Nice, but a hard setup for beginners. I wanted a single exe that just runs. #
Beginners need visible panes. Explorer, editor, console, and AI chat as separate, obvious panes is simply easier to learn.
Nothing matched all of this — so I built it, with AI, in under 3 days.
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Features
Free + BYOK — bring your own Gemini API key, pay Google directly for what you use. No subscription, no markup. #
Fully offline option — point it at Ollama (Gemma, Qwen, ...) and every request goes to localhost only. Your code never leaves the machine. #
No telemetry — the only network calls go to the LLM endpoint you configure. Source-available, so you can verify that yourself. #
Human-in-the-loop — writes are confined to the project root; file creation, diff edits, and shell commands all require approval. #
LiteLLM proxy support — real API keys never sit on the client. #
Token-efficient context — the AI gets the file tree and fetches
contents on demand via// GREP: /// READ_FILE: commands. #
Cheap by default — Gemini 3.8 Flash is at introductory pricing (half the standard rate) through the end of 2026, and even cheaper models like 3.5 Flash-Lite are selectable.
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Tech stack
Electron / React / TypeScript / Monaco Editor / Gemini API & Ollama /
Vite
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License
FSL-1.1-MIT (source-available). Free to use, modify, fork, and redistribute for any non-competing purpose — including commercial work
inside your company. The one restriction: you can't sell it (or a
renamed clone) as a competing product. Each release automatically
converts to MIT two years after publication.
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Honest limitations
It's chat/agent-centric (no inline completions), there's no codebase
index (tree + on-demand reads instead), editor tabs don't exist yet,
and it's Windows-first with the UI in English/Japanese.
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Roadmap
Considering PDF/image recognition, making the agent loop more reliable
on small local models, and chat improvements (multiple chat tabs).
Feedback and bug reports welcome via