VS Code

Give VS Code a citable project memory backed by your Cognee Cloud tenant.

The Cognee — Project Memory extension gives your editor a persistent, citable memory of the project. Remember and recall knowledge without leaving VS Code, and ask your project memory — get answers grounded in what Cognee knows about the current repository, with links back to the exact source files.

It works against a local Cognee server or, as covered here, your Cognee Cloud tenant. The extension needs no environment variables — it’s configured entirely through VS Code settings and secret storage.

1. Install the extension

Install Cognee — Project Memory (extension ID cognee.cognee-vscode) from the VS Code Marketplace — search for it in the Extensions view. If it isn’t available in your Marketplace yet, install the bundled VSIX with Install from VSIX…, or the CLI:

code --install-extension cognee-vscode-0.1.1.vsix

Requires VS Code 1.85.0 or newer.

2. Connect to Cognee Cloud

Run Cognee: Set Up from the command palette (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P):

1. Enter your endpoint

   Your Cloud tenant URL, e.g. https://your-tenant.aws.cognee.ai.

2. Enter your API key

   A key from the API Keys page. It’s stored securely in the OS keychain (secret storage) — not in settings.json.

3. Health check

   The command runs a health check so you know the connection works before you start.

3. Use it

1. Remember

   Open a file, select some code, and run Cognee: Remember Selection.

2. Ask

   Run Cognee: Ask My Project Memory and ask a question — the answer appears in a panel with ranked, clickable citations that open the exact source file.

Commands

Command	What it does
Cognee: Ask My Project Memory	Open the panel and query the repo’s memory with citations
Cognee: Recall	One-off query from the palette
Cognee: Remember Selection	Store the current selection (or the whole file)
Cognee: Remember File	Store a file (also on the explorer context menu)
Cognee: Remember Note	Store a free-form note typed into an input box
Cognee: Index Workspace	Bulk-ingest eligible files after a preflight confirmation
Cognee: Forget Project Memory	Clear the graph (keep files) or delete the dataset
Cognee: Set Up	Configure endpoint + key and run a health check

Per-repository datasets

Each repository maps to a stable vscode_<hash> dataset, derived from the git remote (or the workspace path as a fallback), so memory stays isolated per project. Set cognee.datasetOverride to pin a fixed dataset name instead.

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
cognee.endpoint	http://localhost:8011	Cognee backend base URL (set to your tenant URL for Cloud)
cognee.apiKey	""	API key, sent as the X-Api-Key header. Prefer Cognee: Set Up, which uses secret storage
cognee.datasetOverride	""	Fixed dataset name; empty derives vscode_<hash> per repo
cognee.searchType	auto	Recall strategy; auto lets Cognee route the query, or force one of GRAPH_COMPLETION, GRAPH_COMPLETION_COT, RAG_COMPLETION, CHUNKS, SUMMARIES
cognee.topK	15	Max recall results
cognee.includeReferences	true	Attach source citations to answers
cognee.ingestion.respectGitignore	true	Skip .gitignore/.cogneeignore files when indexing (dependency/build dirs always skipped)
cognee.ingestion.maxFileSizeKb	512	Skip files larger than this when indexing
cognee.requestTimeoutMs	300000	HTTP request timeout

How it works

The extension talks to Cognee over the HTTP API: Ask / Recall → POST /api/v1/recall (with include_references: true, scoped to the workspace dataset); Remember / Index → POST /api/v1/remember (ingest + graph build in one call); Forget → POST /api/v1/forget. Everything it ingests carries a Source: <path> header, so a citation resolves straight to the exact file — even when several files share a name. Each upload is named after its content (<name>-<sha256[:32]>.<ext>, e.g. note-<hash>.md), so repeated notes and same-named files don’t collide in the dataset; citations strip the suffix and still show the original name.

Prefer GitHub Copilot’s agent mode instead of the extension? VS Code can also use Cognee as an MCP tool provider via .vscode/mcp.json — see Claude Desktop for the shared Cloud MCP config and Cloud MCP for the details.

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GitHub Repository

Source, settings, and development guide

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