I made a VS Code extension that acts as an MCP server, allowing Claude desktop (and other clients) to code in an active VS Code workspace. This was driven by my own needs; github copilot is somewhat restrictive with the number of requests every month on the Pro tier and plus I want Claude for non-coding tasks anyway. I have been using Serena, which works great, but it was a bit cumbersome for my workflow. (Not criticising Serena; it is very cool and I recommend checking it out! It's just a bit cumbersome to have to edit the configuration file every time I start a new project, since I have to juggle a large number of separate codebases for work. That is probably not the case for everyone, or even most people.)

This extension is inspired by Serena but is less fully featured in some ways. What it does do, however, is expose your active VS Code workspace, so that you can switch projects just by switching to a different folder/workspace configuration in VS Code. In addition, VS Code diagnostics (ie. the "problems" tab that shows syntax errors, linter warnings, etc.) are exposed as an MCP tool.

Let me know what you think! I have been coding for quite a while, but mostly in the high performance computing and scientific ML spaces, so Typescript is quite new to me and I did lean on Claude more than usual. If you want to contribute, PRs are greatly appreciated :)

Github: https://github.com/juehang/vscode-mcp-server
VS Code Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JuehangQin.vscode-mcp-server

Here's a demo video:

Thanks so much to /u/thelastlokean for raving about this.
I've been spending days writing my own custom scripts with grep, ast-grep, and writing tracing through instrumentation hooks and open telemetry to get Claude to understand the structure of the various api calls and function calls.... Wow. Then Serena MCP (+ Claude Code) seems to be built exactly to solve that.

Within a few moments of reading some of the docs and trying it out I can immediately see this is a game changer.

Don't take my word, try it out. Especially if your project is starting to become more complex.

https://github.com/oraios/serena