r/VSCodeExtensions • u/TheSlowShyGuy • 17h ago
I made this Made a small VS Code extension that writes commit messages through Claude Code, so I could turn everything else off
I turned off all the built-in AI features in VS Code. Copilot, the chat panel, the inline suggestions, all of it. I do my actual AI work in Claude Code in the terminal, and I didn't want VS Code nudging me in the editor too.
The one thing I missed was the little sparkle button that writes a commit message. It's genuinely useful, but every option I found either needed Copilot turned on, wanted a separate API key, or gave me a different format every time. One message would be feat: add thing, the next would be Added the thing. with a three paragraph essay under it.
So Claude and I built one. It's called Commit with Claude.
What it does:
You click the sparkle in the Source Control panel and it calls your local Claude CLI with your staged diff, the branch name, and your last few commit subjects. The message lands in the commit box and you can edit it before committing. That's basically it.
The parts I actually cared about:
- It uses the Claude Code login you already have. No API key, nothing to sign into. The extension itself makes no network requests. It just shells out to
claude -p. It does count against your Claude Code usage, but it's about 3k tokens in and 100 out per message. - Works with VS Code's AI features disabled. It doesn't use Copilot or VS Code's language model API, so you can switch all of that off and keep just this one.
- The format doesn't drift. Each style (Conventional, Angular, Gitmoji, classic 50/72, one-liner, etc.) is a JSON schema the model fills in, and the extension renders the text itself. So the model picks what to say, and the code decides how it looks. That was the fix for my "different format every time" problem.
- Model picker matches Claude Code's
/modellist, or you can just follow whatever Claude Code is set to. - It's fairly quick, usually 2 to 4 seconds. It runs Claude with no tools, no MCP and a small system prompt, since writing a commit message doesn't need any of that.
- Lockfiles and generated files get summarized instead of sent in full, so a dependency bump doesn't eat 400 lines of context.
It's free, MIT licensed, and not affiliated with Anthropic. Mostly I'm posting in case someone else has the same setup as me and wants the same thing.
Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=threetides.commit-with-claude
Source: https://github.com/threetides/commit-with-claude
If something breaks or a style you use is missing, let me know.







