AgentShift: Claude Code Profiles
AgentShift is a small Cursor and VS Code extension for switching between isolated Claude Code accounts and organizations. Each managed profile receives its own CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, so Claude settings, project data, transcripts, and authentication context remain separate.
Features
- Switch profiles from the status bar or command palette.
- Create a profile and launch the documented
claude auth login flow.
- Keep a per-workspace default, with optional ordered path rules.
- Toggle back to the previous profile with
Cmd+Alt+[ on macOS or Ctrl+Alt+[ elsewhere.
- Optionally share conversations, settings, skills, and plugins across every profile while logins stay separate (AgentShift: Profile Data Sharing).
- Browse transcript names and modification times across profiles, then copy one conversation into the active profile and resume it as a fork.
- Detect documented session and weekly limit messages through a profile-local StopFailure hook and suggest another signed-in profile.
- Show current five-hour and weekly usage for each signed-in subscription profile.
- No telemetry, direct network requests, runtime dependencies, or direct credential-store access.
Setup
- Install Claude Code and sign in to the Default profile if desired.
- Install AgentShift.
- Run AgentShift: Add Profile, choose a name and login method, then complete Claude's login in the integrated terminal.
- Select the status bar item to switch profiles. Choose Restart when prompted: AgentShift restarts the extension host (not the whole window) so an already-running Claude Code panel adopts the selected environment. Switching back to the profile the window started with needs no restart.
Managed profiles default to ~/.agent-shift/profiles; metadata is stored in ~/.agent-shift/profiles.json. The Default profile remains ~/.claude and is never deleted by AgentShift.
Settings
agentShift.profileRoot: managed profile directory. This and agentShift.rules are read only from user or remote-machine settings, never from a workspace.agentShift.reloadBehavior: ask, always, or never.agentShift.rules: ordered { "glob": "…", "profile": "…" } workspace-path rules.agentShift.suggestSwitchOnLimit: enable limit suggestions.agentShift.statusBarStyle: name, compact, or hidden.agentShift.dataSharing: isolated (default) or shared. Shared links each profile's projects, todos, file-history, plans, shell-snapshots, history.jsonl, settings.json, CLAUDE.md, keybindings.json, agents, commands, skills, hooks, output-styles, and plugins to ~/.claude. Existing profile data is merged in first; anything that clashes is kept in the profile's .agent-shift-backup folder. Turning sharing off copies configuration back and leaves conversations in ~/.claude.
AgentShift activates on * because it must synchronously set the selected profile environment before the Claude Code extension starts. Command-only activation can run too late and could let the Claude panel start with a different account.
Limitations
- Profile switching is best effort for an already-running Claude Code panel and requires an extension-host restart (or window reload) to take effect.
- Existing terminals keep their original environment; newly created terminals inherit the selected profile.
- Console/API-billing sign-ins may use global Claude state outside
CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR and may not be isolated.
- Cursor, Remote SSH, WSL, and development containers are best-effort compatibility targets.
- Multi-root workspaces use the first workspace folder for rules and history.
- Shared mode keeps
.claude.json per profile because it holds the signed-in account, so user-scope MCP servers and per-project trust are not shared.
- Untrusted workspaces are read-only.
- History resume copies a transcript before invoking documented resume flags. Discovery of that copied transcript is not a public Claude Code contract.
Undocumented dependencies
The implementation isolates and marks eight observed or inferred behaviors: extension-host environment inheritance by Claude Code, an extension-host restart being enough for the Claude panel to adopt a new profile, optional identity fields in auth status JSON, discovery of a copied transcript, long workspace-path encoding, subscription caps reaching StopFailure as rate_limit, Cursor-specific hosting compatibility, and the experimental SDK usage report appearing in CLI stream JSON. See docs/FEASIBILITY.md for the complete risk and mitigation table.
Development
npm install
npm run build
npm test
npx tsc --noEmit
npm run test:integration
npx @vscode/vsce package --no-dependencies --allow-star-activation
Tests use temporary directories, fake homes, and fake Claude executables. They never invoke login or logout against a real Claude configuration.
Contributing
Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, checks, and the project rules, and use the bug report form for bugs.
Trademark
Claude and Anthropic are trademarks of Anthropic PBC. AgentShift is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.
License
MIT. See LICENSE and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
