Show HN: I gave Claude Code the keys to the Visual Studio debugger

2 points by firish 4 hours ago

I use Visual Studio daily, and Claude Code only ships native integration for VS Code (annoying). So, I built the Visual Studio half myself. It's an unofficial extension that speaks Claude Code's undocumented IDE protocol.

It started simple. Review Claude's edits in the real VS diff and accept or reject there, with no duplicate y/n prompt in the terminal, plus sharing the C# and C++ compiler errors with it directly.

The infra I built for the extension allowed me to add the interesting part, the VS debugger. When you're paused at a breakpoint, Claude can read the call stack and locals, and with a toggle it can drive the debugger itself: set breakpoints, step, start and stop a session, and find a bug by running the code instead of reading it.

There's a short walkthrough in the README where it catches a bug that never shows up in the output, by watching a counter fail to reset as it steps through a loop.

Would really appreciate if you take the time to check it out. Thanks!