Debate Room

Two AI agents argue a topic in one Markdown document, you cut in whenever you want, and the debate ends in a conclusion.

Debate Room drives the OpenAI Codex CLI and the Anthropic Claude Code CLI in turns. Each turn is appended to a single Markdown file, so the whole exchange stays reviewable, diffable, and yours. And you are the third participant — type into the panel at any round and the next turn is instructed to answer you.

Read this before installing. Debate Room ships no models and no API keys. It runs the CLIs that come with the Codex and Claude Code extensions, so both must already be installed and signed in. Without them Debate Room cannot run a single turn.

Debate Room is an independent extension. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by OpenAI or Anthropic.

Every turn lands in a plain Markdown file inside your workspace. No database, no account, no export step — the record is reviewable, diffable, and yours.

When the rounds are done, one more pass writes the synthesis: what the two agreed on, what stayed unresolved, and what to check next. You can step in at any round and the next turn has to answer you.

Requirements

• VS Code 1.85 or newer
• Codex – OpenAI's coding agent
• Claude Code for VS Code

Both extensions ship the CLI binaries the debate runs on, and you must already be signed in to each. Debate Room never sends anything anywhere itself — it only invokes the CLIs you already have.

How it works

Press Debate Room in the status bar. The window splits into three areas:

Enter a topic and a round count, then start. For each round Debate Room asks GPT, then Claude, and writes both answers into the document. When the rounds are done, one more pass writes the synthesis.

The panel renders the debate as it fills in — GPT on the left, Claude on the right, the synthesis at the bottom.

You can join in

Write in the box under the synthesis. Your message is appended to the document as a Me section, and the next turn is instructed to address it. If text is waiting in the box when you press Resume, Add 2 rounds, or Next round, it is saved first so the new rounds read it.

Neither model is assigned a side

Both participants get the same instructions. Nobody is told to argue for or against, because a topic is often a comparison rather than a yes/no question, and there is no principled reason to make one model the proponent. Instead each turn is asked to concede what holds and to name exactly where it diverges.

Picking up later

Past debates are listed on the main screen. Opening one shows the whole exchange.

• Resume fills only the empty slots, so a stopped debate continues where it left off without paying for turns that already ran.
• Add 2 rounds appends rounds to a finished debate and rewrites the synthesis.

Where documents go

Debates are written to .debate-room/sessions/ in the workspace folder of the file you are currently working in. That is deliberate: a debate about a project belongs beside that project. If no text editor is open, the first workspace folder is used.

Settings

Korean and English are supported. The language is recorded by the document itself, so a Korean debate keeps running in Korean even if you switch the UI.

Troubleshooting

Open the Debate Room output channel. Every CLI invocation, every turn, and every error is logged there with the exact command line.

A known failure: if ~/.codex/rules/ contains a malformed rules file, the Codex CLI exits before it starts. Debate Room passes --ignore-rules to avoid this, but your own codex invocations will still fail until the file is fixed.

Development

npm install
npm run compile   # type-check and build
npm run check     # run the tests
npm run package   # build a .vsix
node tools/make-icon.js   # regenerate the icon

Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host.

If you use VS Code profiles, install into the profile you are actually using:

code --profile "<profile name>" --install-extension .\debate-room-1.0.0.vsix --force

Without --profile the extension lands in the default profile, which may not be the window you are looking at.

License

MIT