PullerBear

🐻‍❄️ PullerBear is a VS Code extension that watches your Git remote, summarizes incoming commits with AI, and gives you a chat interface to ask follow-up questions before you pull.

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Inspiration

We’ve all been there: you spend three hours refactoring a function, only to realize a teammate deleted it two hours ago. While Git is excellent at version control, it is notoriously reactive—you often don't discover a conflict until the "damage" is already done.

🐻‍❄️ PullerBear was born to eliminate 'merge-conflict fatigue' by transforming Git from a quiet background tool into a proactive teammate, making remote changes impossible to ignore before they become problems.

What it does

  • Monitors your repository on an interval and fetches remote updates.
  • Detects when your branch is behind a target remote branch.
  • Generates an AI summary of incoming changes.
  • Shows summaries in a dedicated sidebar view: PullerBear → What's New.
  • Lets you manually refresh with the reload button.
  • Features a built-in chat box to ask specific questions about incoming code, such as: "Will these changes affect the API endpoints I'm currently editing?"
  • Automatically clears summaries and chat history once a pull/update is detected to keep your workspace clutter-free.

How we built it

We built it using Visual Studio Code's Extension Development Host. We used OpenRouter as the interface for the LLM. The project was developed using TypeScript and React.

Challenges we ran into

  • We ran into many challenges during development like getting the AI setup and fetching the commits/changes from the target remote branch properly.
  • Early versions of the AI would occasionally invent code changes. We solved this through iterative prompt engineering and strict output schema validation, ensuring the AI strictly adheres to the provided prompt

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of our Low-Latency Feedback Loop. We successfully implemented a local state management system that synchronizes the UI with the Git filesystem. Seeing a "New Changes" alert pop up the second a teammate pushes code—without hitting a manual fetch—felt like magic.

What we learned

We gained deep experience in the VS Code Extension API, specifically Webview Providers for the React-based sidebar and the intricacies of the vscode.git extension integration. It's really an exciting opportunity for us since this is our first time trying to develop a VS Code Extension.

What's next for 🐻‍❄️ PullerBear

  • Implementing logic to warn users if an incoming change touches the specific lines of code they are currently editing.
  • Improving the quality of the summary and host the LLM ourselves in the future.
  • Expanding PullerBear beyond the VS Code Marketplace to other JetBrains IDEs.

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