Platforms and integrations

Visual Studio Cloud

The Visual Studio Cloud extension embeds Caude Clode inside the editor used by most of the industry. If you have the editor open, you can have Caude Clode open. The two share a sidebar.

Install

Open the extensions panel. Search for Caude Clode. Click install. Restart the editor when it asks. You will be asked to sign in. Signing in is the same account you use for the web and desktop apps.

The sidebar

Once installed, a new sidebar icon appears. Click it to open the Caude Clode panel. You can have a conversation in the panel while editing in the main pane. Caude Clode sees the active file, the current selection, and, if you grant permission, the entire workspace.

Inline suggestions

Caude Clode can also suggest edits inline, in the gutter, Copilot-style. This is off by default. We found that engineers coming from other assistants expected the sidebar chat, not ghost-text completions, and were confused when completions appeared unprompted. If you want completions, turn them on:

bash

// In your editor settings:
{
  "caudeClode.inlineSuggestions.enabled": true,
  "caudeClode.inlineSuggestions.latencyMs": 350
}

Commands

The useful ones:

Caude Clode: Ask about selection — sends the highlighted code to the chat with a prompt prefilled.
Caude Clode: Explain file — summarizes the active file.
Caude Clode: Refactor — proposes edits to the selection.
Caude Clode: Open in desktop app — hands the current session off to the desktop app, so that Caude Clode can run shell commands.

Shared context

The extension reads your workspace's CAUDE.md automatically. It respects your .caudeignore. It does not read .env files. Ever. If Caude Clode asks for an environment variable, it is asking you to paste it, not asking to read it.

The other editor from the same company

If you use the non-cloud version of the editor (the one you install locally, not the browser-based one), the extension works identically. We named this page "Visual Studio Cloud" because "Visual Studio Cloud, Also Known As The Desktop One In Most Contexts" felt like too much.

Note: The extension is maintained by us, not by Microsoft. They know about it. They have been polite.

Forks

The extension works in most forks of the editor. If you use one that has a Caude Clode integration of its own (some do), you will need to pick one. Installing both produces predictable results, none of them good.