ExplainYourself
An AI-assisted code review helper tool for VS Code. Before you commit, Claude explains your uncommitted changes, and you stage each change once you understand and accept it.
- Changes grouped for reading. Claude sorts the change set into categories, each with what the code did before and what it does now. Categories and sections come in reading order, from low-level code up, with tests last.
- Summaries next to the code. Each relevant region of code is a section with a summary, shown in the panel and above the code in VS Code's own diff editor. Long methods get a short note above each part.
- Review findings. Each category and section lists what a careful reviewer would push back on: hacks, duplication, layering problems, outdated documentation, performance traps, and breaks of your
CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md conventions. The rules are editable.
- Fast staging with undo. Stage a section, a category, a hunk or selected lines with one click or
Ctrl+Alt+S. Ctrl+Alt+Z undoes any of them.
- Nothing slips through. A progress grid shows what is reviewed and staged. Changes no section covers are listed separately.
- Context from the session that wrote the code. When a Claude Code session made the changes, the review agent continues from a fork of it, so it knows why the code changed.
Requirements
- VS Code 1.90 or later.
- The Claude Code CLI and a Claude account. The Claude entry in the status bar installs the CLI and signs in if needed.
Usage
- Open ExplainYourself in the activity bar. It uses the workspace's git repository.
- Click Generate review. Claude reads all changes from HEAD to the working tree, including untracked files.
- Open a category, then click a section to see its code in the diff.
- Stage what you accept: Stage on a section, Stage all on a category, the Stage hunk buttons in the diff, or
Ctrl+Alt+S for the selected lines.
- After you edit the code, Update review re-reviews only the files that changed.
| Key |
Action |
Ctrl+Alt+S |
Stage the selected lines, or the hunk under the cursor. Unstages in the HEAD ↔ index diff. |
Ctrl+Alt+Z / Ctrl+Alt+Y |
Undo / redo the last stage or unstage. |
Ctrl+Alt+O |
Jump to the related section, such as a method's declaration and its definition. |
Rules in the panel opens the review rules for editing. Settings are under explainYourself.*; the most useful one is explainYourself.model (default claude-sonnet-5-5).
The guide describes every feature in detail: review rules, submodules, how sections follow later edits, where the context comes from, all settings, development and publishing.
Building from source
npm install
npm run package
code --install-extension explain-yourself-0.1.0.vsix
License
MIT
| |
