Glance for Claude Code

by Hamza Waleed

Run multiple Claude Code sessions side-by-side in VS Code, with a live status card for each one.

Every agent runs in a real VS Code terminal. Each one reports its own title, one-line TL;DR, progress, and a flag when it's blocked on you — all on a card in the sidebar — so you can keep five sessions humming without losing track of which one needs you next.

Install

From the VS Marketplace: hamzawaleed.glance-claude-code — or in VS Code, open Extensions and search for "Glance for Claude Code".

Requirements:

• VS Code 1.90+
• Claude Code (claude binary on PATH)
• A workspace folder open

Click the Glance icon in the activity bar to open the panel, then hit + New Session (or Cmd+Shift+G / Ctrl+Shift+G).

What you see

Status cards driven by Claude itself

Glance ships a tiny MCP server and instructs Claude to call its update_state tool at the end of every turn. The tool's JSON payload lights up the card — no transcript parsing, no scraping shell output.

Five fields, sent on every call (pass null for what doesn't apply):

The card also tracks lifecycle automatically — turn-complete plays a tone, /clear and /compact reset the card, and Claude's idle "Notification" pings are ignored mid-stream so they don't false-positive the attention flag.

Drag to reorder

Hold any card and drop it where you want it. Order persists across reloads.

Attention badge on the activity bar

When any agent needs input or hits an error, the Glance icon in the activity bar shows a count badge — so you know to come back even when the sidebar is collapsed or you're in another panel.

Toast when a turn finishes in the background

If you're not actively watching an agent when its turn completes, Glance fires a native VS Code information toast (plus a short tone) so the result reaches you without yanking focus. The toast carries the agent's name, the latest tldr or needsInput reason, and a Show button that jumps straight to that terminal.

The toast is suppressed when you're already looking at that agent's terminal, so you don't get pinged for work you're staring at.

Sessions persist across reloads

Close VS Code, reopen it — your agents are still there. Reload-the-window doesn't kill them either. Cards render from the last known state immediately; clicking one revives the session via claude --resume <sessionId> only when you focus it, so dormant agents cost nothing.

(Agents you spawned but never prompted aren't persisted, since there's no transcript to resume from.)

Per-agent model picker

The dropdown chevron next to + New Session lets you choose Opus / Sonnet / Haiku per agent. The card shows a small chip with the active model.

Keybindings

Double-click a card title to rename it. Renames are sticky — AI updates won't overwrite a manual title until you /clear the session.

License

MIT.