Carrick for VS Code

Carrick puts the workspace index's verdicts inside your editor. It tracks cross-service routes and API calls, flags contracts that no longer hold, and gives one-click navigation between producers and consumers across services, in one repository or many.

Features

• Diagnostics in the Problems panel. Contract mismatches and route issues are published straight to the Problems panel. An editor-hosted agent (Cursor, Windsurf) reads that panel after its own edits, so a diagnostic reaches the agent without anyone writing a prompt.
• Cross-service code lens. A small count and contract status sits above each indexed route and call site. Clicking it lists the matching locations and jumps to one, in any service. A row the index knows nothing about gets no lens: on a laptop index a missing consumer means "not indexed here", not "nobody calls this", so nothing ever says zero.
• Cross-service definition and references. Go to Definition on an API call jumps to the route handler that serves it, in another service or another repository. On a route it lists every call site that reaches it.
• Boundary in the status bar. Shows the indexed service and the commit the index was taken at. Hovering shows what that scan could not classify, so an empty Problems panel is readable.
• Editor compatibility. Works in VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf and VSCodium. VS Code resolves it from the Visual Studio Marketplace; the others from Open VSX.

Installation and setup

The extension does not bundle a language server. It starts carrick lsp --stdio from your environment, so the CLI has to be installed first.

1. Install the CLI

Node.js 24 or newer, then:

npm install -g carrick

2. Initialise your workspace

In the folder that holds your repositories:

# Finds the repos, writes the service proposal, wires up the hooks. Runs no scan.
carrick init

# Builds the index: Carrick classifies what the deterministic passes could not.
# This is the scan, and it runs once. Your agent writes carrick.json first.
carrick index

Note: If the CLI is installed somewhere that is not on PATH, point the carrick.binary setting at it. Without a usable binary or an index, the server publishes nothing and says why in the Carrick output channel.

Extension settings

Each setting turns off its own surface and leaves the others standing. Changes take effect on the next publish, with no window reload.

The full table, including what a non-VS-Code client sends instead and the cap on how many rows one check may publish, is in the plugin README.

Development and building

The extension and the scanner are always the same version, because the CLI is the only server there is.

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Compile src/extension.ts to out/
npm run build

# Package the extension as a .vsix
npx --yes @vscode/vsce package

The generated .vsix is gitignored. release.yml runs the same vsce package at the release version, attaches the .vsix to the GitHub release and publishes it to Open VSX.