I'm a full-stack developer, mostly frontend, and for years VS Code was my favorite tool. For writing code, it is still the best environment I know.
Then AI agents changed how I work. I basically stopped writing code myself, because agents do it faster and often better than I do. So the things VS Code is great at (compiling, showing lint errors, jumping to a class or interface by clicking its name) are things I hardly need anymore.
What I do now is design and testing:
I review the plans and designs the agent writes as Markdown documents.
I ask it for diagrams and review them as rendered Mermaid.
I ask for HTML mockups, adjust them, and only then let it implement.
After implementation, I test, mostly the web UI. An agent can't really see the UI, and it can't check interactions or animations at all.
For this kind of review work, VS Code turned out to be clumsy. There are extensions that show Markdown and Mermaid, but clicking a .md file opens it in the text editor. To see it rendered, I have to click a button or choose "Open With…". Even then the preview doesn't replace the text tab: it opens another one, usually in a narrow panel on the right. On a small monitor, that means a lot of clicking and dragging before I can actually read anything.
So I built Persephone around one idea: one click on a file shows it the way I want to review it. Documentation is rendered, diagrams are drawn, mockups run. It keeps the VS Code layout I'm used to (explorer on the left, tabs, the Monaco editor when I do need the text), but every file opens in the view I review it in.
It also fits how I work on several projects at once. Each project is open in its own Persephone page, and the agent chats run in a multi-tab terminal. My whole setup is two windows side by side: Persephone and Windows Terminal.
Since then, Persephone has grown with my needs:
Boards: small apps inside Persephone that the agent builds for a specific job. One starts and stops my project's backend and frontend, with buttons that open each log file. Another is attached to the project's task dashboard file and lists the tasks with filters by status.
Browser tools for the agent, similar to Playwright. The agent can test my frontend application, look things up on a website, or summarize a page for me.
This community is the place for all of that: how you review and test what your agents build, the boards and viewers you make, and any questions about Persephone.