Settings and data: where everything is stored

Nothing the extension writes lives inside your solution. Settings go to the Visual Studio settings store, everything else to a folder under %LOCALAPPDATA%, apart from a few lines in the CLI’s own files and scratch copies in %TEMP%, both listed below. Chat sessions are not ours at all: they belong to the CLI, in ~/.claude, shared with the Claude Code CLI and the VS Code extension.

Uninstalling the extension leaves both trees behind: see Removing everything.

What the extension writes

What	Where
Environment profiles	%LOCALAPPDATA%\Corsinvest\cv4vs-agents\profiles.json
Context-menu prompts	%LOCALAPPDATA%\Corsinvest\cv4vs-agents\prompts.json
@ picker ignore rules	%LOCALAPPDATA%\Corsinvest\cv4vs-agents\picker-ignore.gitignore
Open panes per solution	…\cv4vs-agents\data\projects\<name>-<hash>\workspace.json
Usage stats cache	…\<name>-<hash>\<config-id>\stats-cache.json

Plus two caches in the same folder: WebView2\ (chat UI storage) and icons\, both rebuilt on demand if deleted.

picker-ignore.gitignore exists only after you open it from Options: until then the built-in defaults apply. workspace.json is written when the solution closes. stats-cache.json is thrown away and rebuilt when a new version of the extension changes its format.

Options are not a file

The Options pages (Tools → Options → cv4vs Agents) are VS DialogPages, so there is no path to point at: Visual Studio persists them in its own settings store, per VS instance. They apply on OK/Apply, never on a keystroke, and they don’t travel with the solution or a copied folder.

Profiles and Prompts are the exceptions: they edit profiles.json and prompts.json (below) instead, so the launcher menu and the context menus can be built without first materialising the Options page. Ignored patterns is a third: the row shows where picker-ignore.gitignore is and its … button opens that file, since the content is a rule list with comments, something to edit in a real editor and copy between machines.

Our data folder

Root: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Corsinvest\cv4vs-agents\

profiles.json                       environment profiles (name, enabled, env vars)
prompts.json                        context-menu prompts, one list per menu (editor, Error List, Output)
editor-prompts.json                 the editor's prompts before prompts.json: read once to carry them over, never written
picker-ignore.gitignore             extra `@` picker ignore rules, on top of the workspace's own
WebView2/                           WebView2 user-data (chat UI cache/storage)
icons/                              file-type icons rasterised from VS KnownMonikers
data/projects/<name>-<hash>/
    project.json                    the folder this data belongs to ({"path": "…"})
    workspace.json                  panes open for this solution (+ each pane's profile)
    <config-id>/
        stats-cache.json            usage stats for this (solution, profile) pair

<name>-<hash> is the solution folder’s own name (up to 30 characters) followed by eight hex digits of a hash of its full path, so K:\source\repos\MyApp becomes MyApp-1a2b3c4d. It is not the CLI’s project folder name: project.json records the path, because the hash cannot be read back. <config-id> is the profile’s config directory with every non-alphanumeric character replaced by - (C--Users-jane--claude), which is why stats are per (solution, profile) while workspace.json is per solution only: a pane’s profile is recorded inside that JSON.

profiles.json holds the environment variables you enter in the Profiles page, ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN among them. It is a plain file with no encryption, readable by anything running as your user.

The CLI’s own data (not ours)

Chat sessions, CLI settings, plugins and skills belong to claude.exe and live in ~/.claude (or %CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR%, or a per-profile directory when the profile sets one):

~/.claude/
    settings.json                   CLI settings (permissions, hooks, env…)
    projects/<project-hash>/*.jsonl one file per session, the transcripts
    file-history/<session-id>/      copies taken before each edit, for Rewind
    ide/<port>.lock                 discovery file for `claude --ide` (written by the extension)

file-history/ holds whole files, not diffs: one copy per file per turn that edited it, and the CLI never removes them. Deleting a session’s folder only costs you the ability to rewind that session; turning Keep file checkpoints off (Options → Chat) stops new ones being written at all. The File history tab measures what they occupy, per project and per session, and deletes them from there, backups whose transcript is already gone included.

We read the session .jsonl files directly (history, resume and the usage stats work that way). What we write into the CLI’s tree is short and deliberate:

Where	What	When
projects/<…>/<id>.jsonl	a custom-title line	you rename a session and no live CLI can do it for us
projects/<…>/<id>.jsonl	an ai-title line	after a session’s first exchange, if it has no title yet
projects/<…>/<new-id>.jsonl	a new transcript	Fork
projects/<…>/<id>.jsonl	deleted	Delete in the session list
settings.json	"diffTool": "auto", only if the key is missing	opening a pane, so edits are reviewed in the IDE diff
settings.json	remoteControlAtStartup	the Remote Control start-up switch
ide/<port>.lock	the discovery file	while the IDE’s MCP server is running
file-history/<id>/	deleted	File history, delete

Outside both trees: opening a tool’s input or output, an attachment, or a diff writes a copy into %TEMP% (<name>_in_<id>.<ext>, cv4vs-agents-<name>.<ext>). The tool copies are marked read-only on purpose; nothing removes them, Windows’ own temp clean-up does.

Because the store is the CLI’s, a conversation started in Visual Studio also appears in the CLI and in the VS Code extension, and vice versa.

Removing everything

1. Uninstall the extension (Extensions → Manage Extensions). This does not remove data.
2. Delete %LOCALAPPDATA%\Corsinvest\cv4vs-agents\: profiles, workspace, caches.
3. Options remain in the VS settings store; they are inert without the extension and are overwritten if you reinstall.
4. ~/.claude is the CLI’s: deleting it removes all your Claude Code sessions, including those created outside Visual Studio.