AI DevNotes

Save LLM chat responses as Markdown notes — straight from your clipboard or editor selection.

Why

When you're working with AI coding assistants — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Devin, ChatGPT — you get useful responses all the time. Most of them get lost in the chat scroll. This extension lets you save any response as a dated Markdown file in one keystroke, then browse, search, and organize them from a dedicated sidebar.

No copy-paste-into-a-new-file dance. No naming the file. No figuring out where to put it. Just hit a shortcut and it's saved.

Features

• One-keystroke save from clipboard — Copy a response in your LLM tool, hit Cmd+Alt+S, and it's saved as YYYY-MM-DD_<title>.md with a title derived from the first heading or line.
• Save editor selection — Select text in any editor and hit Cmd+Alt+N. No selection? Falls back to clipboard automatically.
• New note from scratch — Hit Cmd+Alt+M (or the + button in the sidebar), type a title, and a fresh # <title> note opens ready to write.
• Sidebar tree view — Browse all notes in the AI DevNotes activity bar, with relative timestamps (2h ago, yesterday, etc.) and a live count.
• Pin notes — Keep important notes at the top with the pin toggle.
• Copy to clipboard — Send any note's full content back to the clipboard in one click.
• Rename — Right-click a note or press F2. Pinned state follows the rename, and open editors follow the file.
• Search — Fuzzy search across filenames, content, and tags. Results show a match preview so you can find what you need fast.
• Tag filtering — Add frontmatter tags (tags: [react, hooks]) or inline #hashtags to your notes, then filter the tree by tag.
• Sort modes — Cycle between date, name, and size with a single button. Pinned notes always stay on top.
• Drag and drop — Drop .md files from anywhere in VS Code directly into the tree to move them into your notes folder.
• Live file watching — External changes (git pull, another editor, etc.) are picked up automatically with a debounced refresh.
• Folder resilience — The notes folder is created automatically if it doesn't exist. Change the folder in settings and everything re-wires on the fly.

Getting Started

1. Copy a response from your LLM tool
2. Press Cmd+Alt+S (Mac) or Ctrl+Alt+S (Windows/Linux)
3. The note opens in the editor and appears in the sidebar

That's it. Your notes live in ~/Documents/AI DevNotes by default — change that in settings if you want them somewhere else.

Clipboard Fidelity

This extension works best with sources whose copy action preserves Markdown formatting:

• Cursor — the message copy button preserves Markdown
• Codex CLI — /copy or Ctrl+O preserves Markdown
• Claude Code (terminal) — /copy preserves Markdown
• Devin — /copy in the CLI, or the copy button on code blocks in Desktop
• ChatGPT — the copy button on a message preserves Markdown

Keyboard Shortcuts

F2 applies while the Notes view is focused; the other shortcuts are global.

Settings

Organizing Notes

Notes are plain .md files — no database, no proprietary format. You can add tags in two ways:

Frontmatter tags:

---
tags: [react, hooks, frontend]
---

# React Hooks Patterns

Inline hashtags anywhere in the body:

Learned a neat trick today #python #async

Both are picked up by tag filtering and search.

License

MIT