Show HN: A Prompt Octopus in VSCode

Hey HN, I’m Ben, and I’ve been tinkering with prompt-iteration tooling for about a year. My first idea [1] was an open-source tool that lets you try different variations of prompts, but even though I used it endlessly for the first 5-ish days, I… never used it again.

I wrote other scripts, compiled personal eval sets, and subscribed (then unsubscribed) to a bunch of online tools. Nothing seemed right.

Until last Friday when, talking about side project ideas with my girlfriend, she said, “What if it was in your code editor?”

And I thought, wow, I love this woman.

This VSCode extension instead lets you highlight your prompt text and run it against any and all models [2]. You can toss in your API keys, which are only stored locally, and use it for free.

Any feedback would be invaluable - this is my first extension!

I’ll be adding the same highlighting functionality I have for prompts to schema validation, where you can highlight any form of schema (pydantic, zod, json), and I’ll use a small llm to parse it + format it for different providers.

[1] https://github.com/benguz/prompt-octopus [2] https://promptoctopus.com