DevTower

A pixel office tower for your coding agents. DevTower turns your repos into a tiny 2D office campus inside VS Code: each repo is a cutaway room, and every live Claude Code session is a pixel dev working at a desk. Spawn new agents into git worktrees, watch them type, see when one needs you, open diffs in the native editor, and review pull requests - all from one playful, low-overhead scene.

The problem it solves

Running several coding agents means several worktrees, each in its own directory - and the usual workflow is a window (or terminal tab) per directory. You alt-tab to find which session is waiting on input, cd around to run git status in each, and switch editor windows to review diffs. That context-switching adds up fast once you have more than a couple of agents running.

DevTower collapses it into a single view. Every repo and worktree is a room in one campus and every live session a dev at a desk, so you watch multiple directories and worktrees at once - without switching windows: who is active, who is blocked waiting on you, who finished or errored, each branch's unstaged / staged / commit counts, and each PR's checks and review status. Click a dev to act on it, click a room to focus its crew, and the diff or terminal you need opens in place. Your crew has a place instead of being scattered across windows.

What you get

• A living campus. Each repo is an office room; rooms share walls into one contiguous building. Click a ghost slot to stack the next worktree on top, or reserve another repo as its own tower. New repos animate themselves into existence.
• Pixel devs per agent. One sprite per session with a deterministic look. Animation follows state: active types, waiting raises a hand, complete cheers, error slumps, idle breathes. Crowded rooms huddle at the whiteboard.
• Auto-discovered Claude sessions. Live Claude Code CLI sessions are found from ~/.claude/projects and placed in the tower automatically - no setup. A phantom-session filter keeps only sessions whose process is actually running.
• Sub-agent badge. When a session fans out work with the Task/Agent tool, a small bot glyph and count appear next to the dev - so you can see who has helpers running, including long-lived and background sub-agents.
• Spawn a dev into a worktree. Reserve an empty cell, pick a folder, hit + DEV: DevTower creates a git worktree under .claude/worktrees/ with a Claude-style three-word branch name (like swift-gliding-heron), or runs in the project dir, then launches Claude in a native terminal rooted there.
• Native diffs and terminals. Click a changed file for the real VS Code diff (HEAD <-> working tree). Each agent gets a native integrated terminal in its worktree - the terminal is the conversation.
• Switch directories without leaving the window. Press a room's USE DIR button and DevTower retargets VS Code's own Explorer and Source Control views at that worktree - no second window, no changing your own workspace folder. Hop between repos and worktrees with a click, and the native diffs and each agent's terminal follow the same selected directory.
  • Explorer. USE DIR mounts the worktree as a workspace folder, so the built-in Explorer, quick-open (Cmd/Ctrl+P) and search cover every file (not just changed ones), editable in place. Move, rename, and delete-to-Trash are the Explorer's native actions; a title-bar toggle shows or hides the project root, and swapping worktrees doesn't reload the window.
  • Source Control. A devtower SCM provider shows the selected worktree split into Staged / Changes with inline stage, unstage, discard, stage-all, unstage-all, discard-all, stash, push / pull / fetch, folder-level actions, and commit from the input box, all backed by real git.
• Pull requests in-scene. Each room's board shows its worktree's open PR with the number, title, CI checks, and review status, right next to the branch and change counts; a freshly merged PR lingers with a purple MERGED badge for a few minutes before it clears. (DevTower won't open a PR for you - just ask the agent in its terminal to create it however you like.)
• Mini view (compact popout). A second, canvas-free window beside the tower: a dense table that drills Projects -> Worktrees -> Agents, plus All agents and All PRs tabs. Same live feed as the scene - states, per-branch git stats, and PR/CI status - in a compact list where you can add projects/worktrees, spawn or remove agents, switch the selected directory, and jump to a PR. It's decoupled from the tower - open it on its own from the Command Palette, and it keeps updating even when the scene is closed.

Getting started

1. Install DevTower.
2. Open a folder that has (or will have) Claude Code sessions.
3. The DevTower console opens automatically (an editor-area panel, not an activity-bar view). Re-open it any time from the Command Palette -> DevTower: Open Tower.
4. To see pull requests and checks, open Settings (the ⚙ gear, top right) and add a GitHub token (see below). The tower itself populates as soon as you have a live Claude Code session.

Requirements and what it accesses

DevTower drives your existing command-line tools and makes no network calls of its own (git and gh do their own).

What it reads and writes:

• Reads ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl transcripts to discover sessions and show each agent's model, branch, token usage, and last activity.
• Reads and writes the state feed file (devtower.stateFile, default .devtower/state.jsonl).
• Reads working-tree files and git show HEAD:<file> to render diffs.
• Creates git worktrees (PR reviews go under .claude/worktrees) and runs git / gh / ps / lsof.
• Spawns one VS Code integrated terminal per agent.

On macOS, launch VS Code from a terminal so the extension host inherits your shell PATH; otherwise claude and gh may not be found.

GitHub access and token storage

PR features authenticate with a GitHub Personal Access Token you add in the DevTower settings page (the ⚙ gear, top right). Your token is stored securely in VS Code's SecretStorage, which is backed by your operating system's credential vault - macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, or libsecret / gnome-keyring on Linux. It is encrypted at rest and is never written to settings.json, the workspace, or the repo.

DevTower uses the token only inside the extension: it is passed to the gh subprocess it spawns (via the GH_TOKEN environment variable) and is never sent to the webview, your agent terminals, git, or any network call DevTower makes itself. The settings page recommends a fine-grained, read-only token scoped to just the repositories you choose; you can review which features your token unlocks, and remove it, from the same page.

A look around

The campus at a glance - telemetry across every room and each room's live board, all in one window:

A single room: the worktree's board (branch, unstaged / staged / commit counts, PR cell), the USE DIR and + DEV controls, the ghost slot to stack the next worktree, and the dev at their desk (here with a sub-agent badge):

The agent panel - context-window bar, model, skills, a button into the agent's Claude terminal, and a link to its PR when one exists:

The GitHub access page - connected account, scopes, the features your token unlocks, and pre-filled links to mint a fine-grained read-only token:

The mini view - a compact, canvas-free popout that drills projects -> worktrees -> agents (with All-agents and All-PRs tabs), per-branch git stats, and PR status, off the same live feed as the scene:

Settings

Issues and support

Open an issue at github.com/BradenTerry/DevTower/issues.

License

MIT