The VS Code line is the developer-facing tooling for building the Tom framework itself. It is the DartScript system: a TypeScript VS Code extension that spawns a Dart bridge process, letting Dart code drive the editor and letting AI scripts run in-place against the workspace.

At its centre, `tom_vscode_bridge` is a Dart JSON-RPC server that the extension spawns and talks to over stdin/stdout. It wraps VS Code's Window, Workspace, Commands, Extensions, Language Model, and Chat APIs, and executes Dart through the D4rt interpreter so scripts get full editor access. `tom_vscode_scripting_api` supplies the typed, bridge-agnostic Dart surface scripts write against — namespaced accessors over the same APIs plus a socket bridge client.

Together they let framework authors automate workspace operations, reach GitHub Copilot and other language models from Dart, and host the workflow and tracker panels used while developing Tom. The line sits alongside the DevOps CLI and cloud provisioning as Tom's framework-development tooling, not part of an end-user application.