What goes wrong
You installed the editor. You wrote the prompt. The requests still leave with someone else's defaults — which model, how much repeated context, whether a secret rides along.
A dashboard can make that visible. Visibility is not the same as having a say. You can watch the stream and still be along for the ride.
Why it matters
AI coding tools behave like a second operator on the machine. If policy lives only in each editor, you reconfigure every client when you change your mind. If it lives nowhere, the default is send it.
What good looks like
Pick an outcome. Observe only — see traffic, change nothing. Protect secrets. Spend less. Prefer a local model. Coach the prompts. Or a balanced stack.
The stages follow the goal. You do not have to become a pipeline engineer every time you change your mind. And the honest default is still observe: nothing mutates until you choose.
How Aura Wire helps
Aura Wire sits between your editors and AI providers. During the trial or with Observe ($39 after trial), observation runs continuously. Mutation stages start off. Pipeline Overview is where you pick a goal and the matching stages turn on with safe presets.
- Observe by default when licensed — see traffic, change nothing
- Pick a goal when you want a say: secrets, spend, local models, or coaching
- Tune a stage later without rebuilding editor settings
- Prompts stay off disk
Try Aura Wire free
AI chat for VS Code with a local pipeline behind it — live spend, secrets stopped, nothing stored.