▶ AI Task & Script Explorer

Every script in your workspace, and everything currently running, in one list. Start, stop and restart without ever going looking for a terminal tab.

Extension Features

• ✨ AI tasks — new — a prompt for Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot or Cursor, kept as a row and run with a click: review the uncommitted changes, write the release notes, find what breaks the build. Or for any OpenAI-compatible API — OpenAI, OpenRouter, or a local model in Ollama or LM Studio, where nothing leaves your machine — or for any other command line. Put context in the prompt with ${gitDiff}, ${selection}, ${file} and more. Pick the access an agent runs with — read-only, edit files or full — and where the answer goes: a Markdown report, the clipboard, a notification. The + at the head of the panel → AI Task makes one. A prompt that changed behind your back — a teammate's commit, a hand edit — asks once before it runs, and says what changed.
• 🔁 Folders and workflows — new — lists of your own made out of any tasks the workspace has. A folder starts everything in it at once — the whole dev stack in one click. A workflow runs its steps one after another and stops at the first that fails: lint → test → AI review → build. Drag tasks onto them, and commit them with the project.
• 🎛️ Launch parameters — run scripts with extra arguments, or define reusable text, choice and hidden inputs. Workflows collect inputs before starting.
• 🕘 Run history — recent results, durations and exit codes, with rerun and terminal access. Last results appear beside tasks.
• 🟢 Service readiness — wait for HTTP or TCP before the next workflow step, then clean up the workflow's own services.
• 📋 A panel in the left bar — every task of the workspace as a tree, grouped by the manifest it came from. Nothing moves when a task starts, and the number of running tasks rides on the activity bar icon as a real VS Code badge.
• ⚡ A button in every editor's toolbar — the ▶ icon, so the whole list is one click away from wherever you happen to be.
• ⌨️ A hotkey, from anywhere — Ctrl+Cmd+T (Ctrl+Alt+T on Windows and Linux) opens the whole list without touching the mouse, from the editor, the terminal, anywhere.
• 🔍 Search that matches the command too — type vitest and find the script that runs it, not just the ones called "test". Enter toggles a task, Shift+Enter restarts it.
• ✏️ Rename any row, and any heading — dev becomes API server, and the group titled @acme/api-gateway becomes Gateway. Display only: the project's manifest is never edited, and the real name stays visible beside it and searchable.
• 🖍️ Paint a row — right-click → Change Colour… → one of fifteen, on a task or on a whole folder, each drawn as a circle in its own colour. The list stops being one colour of text and starts being a map of what is yours, what is loud and what you never touch.
• 🖼️ Any icon your icon pack has — right-click → Change Icon…: the icons VS Code ships with first, then every icon of whichever file icon theme you run — Material Icon Theme, vscode-icons — each drawn in the list with its own artwork. Picked by name, so switching packs keeps your choice.
• ⭐ Favorites — star the two or three scripts you actually run and they sit as loose rows at the very top of the tree, above everything, with no heading to open first and without leaving the package they belong to. A compose file or a Dockerfile can be starred too, and comes up there with its ▶ and ■.
• ↕️ Drag rows into the order you want — inside a package, or among the starred rows. The order is remembered per workspace and the manifests are never edited.
• 🎨 Colour and an icon per task — ▶ for dev servers, a beaker for tests, a rocket for releases, a database for migrations, decided by what the task really runs — and your own rules come first.
• 🧩 Eleven ecosystems, one list — package.json, deno.json, Cargo.toml, Makefile.toml, pyproject.toml, Pipfile, tox.ini, noxfile.py, Makefile, justfile, Taskfile.yml, go.mod, composer.json, mise.toml, docker-compose.yml, Dockerfile and the shell scripts every repository accumulates, so a mixed monorepo is still one list.
• 🐳 Docker Compose, as rows — every compose file in the workspace, including the profile-named ones, with up fanned out per service and down, build, logs and ps beside it. ▶ and ■ live on the file's own heading, so a stack goes up and comes down without opening it — a click on the heading brings it up too — and the heading spins while any part of it runs. Check Containers asks Docker what is really up — including stacks you started from a terminal or with up -d — and ■ then stops them.
• 🏗️ Dockerfiles, as one row each — every Dockerfile, Dockerfile.dev and api.Dockerfile in the workspace. ▶ or a click on the file's own row builds it and ☰ beside it holds the rest — one build per FROM … AS <stage>, plus run and whatever else dockerfileCommands names — so a file is a line rather than a folder, and the row spins while a build runs. The image is tagged after the folder it sits in, so a build leaves something you can run rather than a dangling id.
• 💻 Shell scripts, as tasks — .sh, .bash, .zsh and .ksh, and on Windows .ps1, .bat and .cmd, picked up from scripts/, bin/ and the workspace root at any depth. Each project's scripts gather under one shell folder with a terminal icon, a row no category claimed wears the shell it is read by, the dimmed text is the script's own first comment, and each extension is started by the runner that can start it. Add to Terminal puts the command line in a fresh terminal unrun, for when a script takes arguments, and Copy Command — on every script row that runs a command line, not only these, and on compose files and Dockerfiles — puts it on the clipboard.
• ✍️ Custom tasks — a name and a shell command of your own, docker compose down -v && docker compose up -d db included, under Shell scripts at the top of the tree, with AI tasks in a separate AI tasks folder. ⋮ → Create custom task makes the first, the heading's + the rest. Kept in .vscode/task-script-explorer.json: commit it for the team, or keep it to yourself.
• 🧠 Knows how to run things — npm, yarn, pnpm, bun or deno detected per package from packageManager, the lock files and engines; everything else named by the table it is declared in.
• ⏹ Stop all / restart all — kill five watchers before a rebase, or bring the whole stack back up after switching branches, in one click.
• 👀 Running tasks this extension did not start — from tasks.json, other extensions or the built-in npm list — are shown and can be stopped from the same place.

Tasks scatter. A monorepo buries them across a dozen package.json files, the Rust service next to them keeps its own in a Makefile.toml, the Python one in pyproject.toml, and there is a justfile at the root that half the team forgets exists. The stack everything talks to is a docker-compose.yml two folders away, and the half-dozen scripts/*.sh nobody has opened since they were written are how the release actually goes out. The dev server you started an hour ago is alive in a tab you can no longer find, and running anything by hand means getting the directory and the tool right first. AI Task & Script Explorer collapses all of that into one list, and gives you three ways to reach it.

Full documentation — what gets scanned, how each ecosystem is run, every row, button and setting explained.

Visual Studio Code Marketplace link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DenysDavydov.task-runner-ultimate

Open VSX Registry link: https://open-vsx.org/extension/DenysDavydov/task-runner-ultimate

Try another useful extension: AI Browser🏆 Claude + Codex.

Visual Studio Code Marketplace link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DenysDavydov.tab-browser-ultimate-promo

Open VSX Registry link: https://open-vsx.org/extension/DenysDavydov/tab-browser-ultimate

Change log 0.9

• 0.9.15: Run with Arguments… and reusable named launch parameters with text, choice and hidden inputs; folders and workflows collect inputs before starting. New Run History… records results, durations and exit codes, links workflow steps to their run, and offers rerun, terminal access and saved AI reports. Workflow steps can wait for HTTP or TCP readiness, with timeouts, cancellation and cleanup of their own services. Added JSON schema completion and a configuration example. Add to AI Task & Script Explorer is now available for individual shell scripts as well as folders, including gitignored files.

• 0.9.14: New Add to AI Task & Script Explorer in the right-click menu of a folder in VS Code's Explorer: the manifests and scripts inside it are listed even when git ignores the folder — a scratch directory, a worktree copy, generated code — and Remove Folder from AI Task & Script Explorer on its rows takes it out again. An added folder is searched for itself, so a large workspace does not use up the search limit before reaching it, and Copy Command stays in the right-click menu of its compose files and Dockerfiles. Stopping a Codex task at the moment it starts now stops it, instead of leaving the agent running.

• 0.9.13: AI tasks can now run on Cursor's CLI (agent, formerly cursor-agent), held to read-only (its ask mode), edit files or full access, with its sandbox on at the two limited levels; a read-only or edit-files Cursor task does not run in a folder whose .cursor/cli.json or .cursor/hooks.json could widen it. Fixes from a full review: a workflow step is no longer ended by another run of the same task finishing; Escape in a workflow's step picker cancels instead of saving; an AI task dragged among shell scripts is refused rather than mixing their order; overlapping edits to .vscode/task-script-explorer.json no longer lose one another; what an agent writes to stderr, and the failure it ends with, can no longer send control sequences to the terminal; Codex's answer is written to a private temporary folder, so two runs no longer clash; Copilot's trusted folders are matched regardless of letter case; a command task on Windows no longer runs a program planted in the workspace folder; just recipes with a colon in a default value, Makefile targets after a .PHONY line and nox sessions with a name parameter are listed correctly; a bad \U escape no longer drops a whole TOML file; tasks written as an inline table in mise, cargo-make and Pipfile are found by Go to Script Definition; and the extension package no longer ships the CI workflow and the manual.

• 0.9.10: AI tasks can now run on GitHub Copilot's CLI, held to read-only, edit files or full access like Claude Code and Codex; on any OpenAI-compatible API — OpenAI, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Groq, or a local Ollama or LM Studio — set up once per machine with AI providers in the ⋮ menu, its key kept in VS Code's secret storage; or on any other command line you name, which is given the prompt on its input and runs with full access. Prompts can take context as they run: ${gitDiff}, ${gitDiffStaged}, ${gitLog}, ${selection}, ${file}, ${filePath} and ${clipboard}. A task whose API provider is not set up on this machine, or whose key is turned away, offers to set it up or pick another.

• 0.9.9: New folders and workflows, made from the + at the head of the panel. Put any tasks of the workspace in one — package scripts, make targets, compose services, custom and AI tasks — by dragging them onto it, with Add to Folder… on a row, or with Add Tasks… on the folder. ▶ on a folder starts everything in it at once; ▶ on a workflow runs its steps one after another, marks each ✓ as it passes, and stops at the first that fails, offering to run again from that step. Both are kept in .vscode/task-script-explorer.json, and one that changed outside the tree asks once before it runs, showing its whole list; a change you make in the tree keeps an approved list approved but never approves one that came from somewhere else. A workflow whose list changes while it runs stops before its next step, ■ stops it before the next step starts, a second ▶ while it is starting is ignored rather than starting it twice, and Run Again from Step N finds the step that failed even if the list has changed since. Scripts in the root of the project are saved without the folder name, so a workflow works in every clone. The extension is now called AI Task & Script Explorer — its commands in the palette, its settings and its messages carry the new name; the view in the activity bar is still Task & Script Explorer.

• 0.9.8: New AI tasks: a prompt for Claude Code or Codex, kept under Custom Tasks and run headless with the access you choose — read-only, edit files, or full. Press the new + at the head of the panel and pick AI Task — or Shell Task for a command line of your own. The answer opens as a Markdown report, goes to the clipboard or shows in a notification, and the agent's progress streams into the task's terminal, where ■ or Ctrl+C stops it. An AI task that reached the file some other way asks once before it runs, and again whenever its prompt, agent or access changes. Approvals of custom tasks and AI tasks alike are now signed with a key kept in VS Code's secret storage, so they cannot be forged by writing into workspace storage. A task whose agent is not installed on this machine, or whose model is not available here, offers to pick the agent and model again and run. New setting taskRunnerUltimate.aiAgentPaths for agents installed somewhere they are not found on their own.

• 0.9.7: A click on a compose file or a Dockerfile row now runs it, docker compose up or docker build, and brings up its terminal; once something of the file's is running, the click goes to that terminal instead. New Copy Command in the right-click menu of every script row, compose file and Dockerfile puts the command line it runs on the clipboard, quoted for your shell. A compose file or a Dockerfile can be added to Favorites with ☆ on its row or from the right-click menu, and shows up there as the file itself, ▶, ■ and click included. Add to Terminal and Copy Command quote for fish as well, and refuse a line holding a control character, or one that needs quoting in a shell they do not know how to quote for.

• 0.9.6: Bug fixes

• 0.9.5: Git worktrees that coding agents check out inside the repository, such as Claude Code's .claude/worktrees/, no longer show up as extra copies of every task. Manifests and scripts that git ignores, through .gitignore, .git/info/exclude or your global excludes file, are left out of the list. Set taskRunnerUltimate.respectGitignore to false to list them again.

• 0.9.4: Stop all and restart all buttons on more headings: the Favorites folder in ecosystem mode, the hidden pile and OTHER TASKS. Hover a heading while something under it runs to see ■ and ⟳.

• 0.9.3: Go to Script Definition is more precise: a duplicated JSON key goes to the occurrence that counts, quoted TOML keys are found, and a short script name is selected as the key rather than inside a longer word. Typographic quotes in a command are kept from breaking PowerShell, Go projects are rescanned less often, and signed hex, octal and binary numbers in TOML are kept as text.

• 0.9.2: Bug fixes

• 0.9.1: Bug fixes

• 0.9.0: Added custom tasks: open the ⋮ menu in the panel header and pick + Create custom task.