Show HN: Claude Code for Visual Studio (native diff with accept/reject)

Posted by firish 1 day ago

VS Code and JetBrains have official Claude Code IDE integration, but Visual Studio doesn't. There's an open GitHub issue with a lot of +1s so I built it myself (check out the gif in the GitHub repo for a visual example).

It implements the same protocol the official plugins use, so the Claude CLI connects to it automatically. You don't configure anything, just install the extension and click Launch.

The main thing it adds over running Claude in a terminal is that edits open in Visual Studio's native diff viewer instead of auto-applying or prompting you in the terminal. You click Accept or Reject right there. You can also reject with a reason, and Claude will take another pass.

It also shares your compiler errors (C# and C++) and your current selection with the CLI automatically, so Claude has context without you having to copy-paste anything.

A few other things: - There's a dockable panel with connection status and token/cost stats for the session - A "run wild" toggle to auto-accept edits without opening the diff Works with the existing claude CLI, no model calls of its own

Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=firish.b...

GitHub: https://github.com/firish/claude_code_vs

Comments

Comment by rsg29 1 day ago

If anyone took the time to check it out, i would love your feedback on the following.

The Claude IDE protocol is undocumented. I reverse-engineered it from the official plugins' WebSocket traffic. For anyone who's built on an undocumented protocol like this, is there a reliable way to handle contract drift when there's no guaranteed spec to code against?

Comment by lavaman131 1 day ago

This is a cool project! I usually review docs/blogs/etc. as much as possible and brainstorm with an llm. I research to see if there are any other open source examples that I can also learn from. I find that this does pretty well. At the end of the day, after the implementation, I continue testing and that's where it gets interesting since I'll run into edge cases that creators of the original product already ran into and resolved and over time it helps make the software more robust as I use it and fix it myself.

Comment by firish 20 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by tuo-lei 20 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by pixelsort 1 day ago

VS Code does actually already have this. I use it in Antigravity IDE.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anthropi...

Comment by firish 20 hours ago

This is for Visual Studio (the full IDE), not VS Code. VS Code and JetBrains both have the official Anthropic extension already. Visual Studio was the gap, since the official plugin doesn't cover it, so that's what this fill.

The biggest features are the ability to view diffs in the IDE instead of the CLI and sharing Roslyn analyzer compiler errors and warnings to the CLI with file and line/char span information to help with debugging.