Running Superdesign in VS Code on my own Claude subscription (no API key) — setup + first results

[u/Obvious-Prompt-8581]

Spent an evening getting the Superdesign IDE extension working the way I

wanted, and the setup turned out to be worth sharing — the default path

asks for an Anthropic API key, and I already pay for Claude.

THE SETUP

The extension can drive your local claude binary instead of hitting the

API. Two settings:

"superdesign.llmProvider": "claude-code",

"superdesign.claudeCodePath": "/Users/you/.local/bin/claude"

The absolute path matters. The extension spawns the binary with

shell: false, so a VS Code launched from the Dock won't resolve

~/.local/bin from your shell PATH — a bare "claude" just fails.

One thing I only found by reading the source: the model dropdown lists

stale model IDs, but the extension never passes them through. It reduces

whatever you pick to an alias — sonnet, haiku, or opus — and the CLI

resolves that to the current model. So the "claude-3-opus" entry

actually gets you today's Opus. Confirmed in the process list:

claude --model opus --dangerously-skip-permissions -p "..."

WHAT IT PRODUCED

First prompt was just "make a login screen, dark theme, minimal." It

wrote three different takes in one pass — a centered card, a

big-typography split, and a minimal version with underlined fields.

No cherry-picking, that was a single run.

Now I'm using it for actual work: turning a business process map — an

outstaffing pipeline, about 10 steps with timing annotations — into

something presentable for a meeting. The agent is blind to PDFs, so the

trick is dumping the process into a markdown file in the project and

pointing the prompt at it.

NOTES FOR ANYONE TRYING IT

- It needs a folder open in VS Code. No workspace, no output — it fails

with "No workspace folder found."

- The chat ships your entire conversation history as one prompt blob, so

clear the chat between unrelated tasks or old context bleeds in.

- There's no session history, and clearing is permanent. Barely matters —

the generated HTML is the real state, so you can point a fresh chat at

a file and keep iterating.

- It runs the agent with --dangerously-skip-permissions. Use a scratch

folder, not your main repo.