VS Code Extension

The official Candela VS Code Extension (candela-vscode) provides real-time visibility into your local LLM usage and daily budgets without leaving your editor. It works in the background by polling your local candela instance and displaying live metrics directly in the status bar.

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                             Live Observability Status

Features

Status Bar Tracker: Displays today’s total tokens (with K/M suffixes), calculated cost, and budget consumption percentage at a glance.
Rich Hover Tooltips: Hover over the status bar item to view a detailed breakdown:
- Input and output token splits
- Request counts
- Budget spent vs. limit with progress status
- Active grant waterfall showing remaining credits, descriptions, and expiration dates.
Failure Backoff & Recovery: Automatically detects if the local candela proxy is offline (displaying $(circle-slash) Candela: offline) and increases the polling interval to 5 minutes to prevent system log spam. It restores normal polling immediately once the daemon is back online.
Visual Alerts: If your daily budget usage crosses your configured threshold (default: 80%), the status bar item changes color to indicate a warning.
Quick Commands: Includes commands to view today’s cost summaries, print visual budget status indicators in the terminal, or launch the web dashboard.

Installation

From Open VSX (Recommended)

Open VS Code Extensions panel (Cmd+Shift+X).
Search for “Candela”.
Click Install.

Or install from the command line:

code --install-extension candelahq.candela-vscode

➡️ View on Open VSX

From GitHub Releases

Download the .vsix from GitHub Releases and install:

code --install-extension candela-vscode-*.vsix

Configuration Settings

You can customize the extension via your VS Code Settings (settings.json):

Setting	Type	Default	Description
`candela.serverUrl`	`string`	`""`	The Candela API URL. If empty, the extension auto-discovers it.
`candela.statusBar.enabled`	`boolean`	`true`	Show or hide the Candela status bar item.
`candela.statusBar.showBudget`	`boolean`	`true`	Show the budget percentage indicator alongside tokens/cost.
`candela.autoRefresh.intervalSeconds`	`number`	`60`	The refresh interval in seconds for normal polling.
`candela.budgetWarning.threshold`	`number`	`80`	Usage percentage threshold at which the status bar turns yellow/warning.

Commands

The extension exposes the following commands in the command palette (Cmd+Shift+P / Ctrl+Shift+P):

`Candela: Show Today's Cost Summary`

Displays an information dialog containing a breakdown of today’s requests, token counts, total spend, and usage by model/provider. Also includes a button to open the web dashboard.

`Candela: Check Budget & Grants`

Outputs a clean text diagram of your budget consumption, spent/limit details, and any active grants including expirations.

💰 Budget Status
Daily: [████████████░░░░░░░░] 60%  $3.00 / $5.00
🎁 Grant: $10.00 / $10.00 — hackathon sprint (expires May 25)
Total available: $12.00

`Candela: Refresh Status`

Invalidates the client cache (which has a 30s TTL by default) and forces an immediate reload of the usage telemetry.

`Candela: Open Web Dashboard`

Launches your default browser pointing to the local dashboard UI (usually http://localhost:8181/_local/).