Why

I live in two editors. VS Code is light and quick, and Claude Code feels right at home there. But when the work gets serious (a large solution, a real refactor, a debugger session that has to just work), I reach for Visual Studio 2022/2026. For that kind of code, VS is, hands down, the better tool.

There was only one thing missing: Claude, inside Visual Studio. Not in a browser tab, not in another window, right there, next to the code, the solution, the debugger.

Everyone had the same advice: “just use the CLI”, “use Claude Desktop”, “use the chat in VS Code”. And they’re all good. Each of them has something I genuinely like: the raw power of the terminal, the polish of the desktop app, the rich in-editor chat. But not one of them had everything together, in the one place I actually work: Visual Studio.

So I stopped waiting for it to exist and rebuilt it, my way: the terminal and the rich chat, both belonging to Visual Studio, wired into its editor, solution, debugger and build. Everything I liked, under one roof.

And then, watching Claude work, a question kept nagging at me. Claude is astonishingly capable, yet it navigates code with almost primordial tools: grep to find a symbol, a text Edit to rename it. I’ve done that by hand. It’s slow, and it’s how you introduce bugs: miss one call site, rename the wrong match. Meanwhile, in my IDE, Find All References and Rename Symbol are native, exact, one keystroke away. So I asked the obvious question: why not give Claude that same superpower?

The same goes for debugging. When something’s wrong, I don’t guess from reading the source; I set a breakpoint, step through, evaluate an expression, watch the values change. That’s how you know what the code actually does. Why should Claude be blind to it? So I gave it that too.

That’s what the MCP tools here are: they hand Visual Studio’s own understanding of your code (navigation, references, rename, diagnostics, and the live debugger with breakpoints, stepping, locals, evaluate) straight to Claude. Not text search over source, but the IDE’s real, semantic, running view of your program.

One more thing kept bothering me, and it wasn’t about code at all. Claude fans work out to sub-agents (several at once, off doing their own thing) and the chat just… sits there. Are they still running? Have they finished already? What is that one actually doing? And if I’ve changed my mind, how do I stop it? I found myself staring at a spinner with no idea whether to wait or give up. So sub-agents got their own little panel: how many are alive, what each is doing right now, how long it’s been at it, and a Stop button next to every one of them. Not a progress bar: the truth.

Because what I really wanted was simple: a partner as sharp as me 😉 (maybe sharper), working the IDE the way I do. This is that project. This is the why.

And yes, I built this CLI/chat for Claude with Claude. There’s something funny about that, and it was a genuinely fun little adventure: watching it sometimes deny things about itself, only to turn around and build them. That’s just part of the LLM game. The code here was written with Claude’s help.

And it keeps a diary. Self-hosting since 27 July 2026, it debugged itself, it left the desk, it changed how I work, and in September it stopped being only mine: the days that were not in the plan.

Daniele Corsini (Frank Lupo)