Agent Diff Tracker

Watch what your AI coding agent is doing, as it does it.

📦 Install from the VS Code Marketplace

Agent Diff Tracker watches your workspace and automatically opens a diff view (working tree vs. last git commit) for every file that changes — so when Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or any other agent edits your code, the diff is already on screen, scrolled to the first changed line. No hunting through the file tree, no guessing what just happened.

It's agent-agnostic by design: it reacts to files changing on disk, so it works with any tool — AI agents, codegen scripts, formatters, a teammate over SSH — with zero integration or configuration.

Features

• One diff tab, always the latest edit — every change opens the same reusable diff tab (HEAD ↔ working tree), without stealing your keyboard focus. The next change replaces it, so you're never hunting through a pile of stale diff tabs. Want to keep one around? Pin the tab (right-click → Pin, or Cmd/Ctrl+K Enter) and the next auto-open opens a fresh tab instead of touching it.
• Jumps to the change that matters — lands on the largest changed block, not just whichever line happens to differ first. An agent that adds one import line and rewrites 40 lines of logic elsewhere lands you on the logic, not stuck at the import.
• Burst batching — files changed together (one agent turn) are treated as one batch and recorded together in history; the diff tab shows the last file in the burst. A debounce window keeps rapid rewrites from flickering.
• Change History sidebar — an activity-bar view of recent change bursts, collapsed by default so it doesn't dump every file on screen. Repeated edits to the same file(s) in a row merge into one entry (edited ×5) instead of piling up a line per save. Click any file to reopen its diff in that same reusable tab.
• Manual-edit filtering (optional) — set minBurstFilesToAutoOpen to 2+ and lone single-file saves (usually you typing) stop auto-opening, while multi-file agent bursts still do. Everything is still recorded in history.
• Sensible noise filtering — build output, caches, and dependency directories across ecosystems (Node, Python, Rust, Go, Java, Ruby, .NET, Swift, Elixir, Terraform, and more) are excluded out of the box, with a hard safety net for the worst offenders (.git, node_modules, __pycache__, target, Pods, *.tsbuildinfo, *.log, …) that user config can't accidentally disable.
• One-click pause — the status bar eye shows what was last touched; click it to pause/resume watching.

Requirements

• The built-in VS Code Git extension (used to resolve the HEAD side of each diff).
• Untracked/new files and files outside a git repo open normally instead of as a diff — there's no baseline to compare against.

Commands

Settings

FAQ

What about brand-new files? Untracked files diff against an empty baseline, so they open as an all-added diff in the same labeled tab style as everything else.

It's ignoring a file I care about. Check whether it lives under a hard-excluded directory (dist, build, vendor, …). Those are intentional: agents and build tools write there constantly and the noise would drown the signal. Source files outside those directories are always watched unless your exclude globs say otherwise.

Does it work without an AI agent? Yes — it has no idea what changed your files. Formatters, git checkouts, scripts, and teammates all show up the same way.

Development

npm install
npm run compile      # build
npm test             # unit + VS Code integration tests
npm run reinstall    # build, package, and install into your local VS Code

Press F5 in VS Code for an Extension Development Host with live source. See CONTRIBUTING.md for architecture rules and the release process.