NOTICE: claude code is available with Anthropic's $20/mo subscription, so I consider codemcp fully obsolete. However, there are some good design ideas (especially around the Git-versioning scheme) that I eventually want to port into the current generation of agentic coding clis.
codemcp
Make Claude Desktop a pair programming assistant by installing codemcp. With it, you can directly ask Claude to implement features, fix bugs and do refactors on a codebase on your computer; Claude will directly edit files and run tests. Say goodbye to copying code in and out of Claude's chat window!
codemcp offers similar functionality to other AI coding software (Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Aider), but it occupies a unique point in the design space:
It's intended to be used with Claude Pro, Anthropic's $20/mo subscription offering. I like paying for my usage with a subscription plan because it means zero marginal cost for agent actions; no more feeling bad that you wasted five bucks on a changeset that doesn't work.
Note that if you have Claude Max ($100/mo), Claude Code can also be used with subscription based pricing. The value proposition for codemcp is murkier in this case (and it is definitely inferior to Claude Code in some respects), but you can still use codemcp with Claude Max if you prefer some of the other UI decisions it makes. (Also, it's open source, so you can change it if you don't like it, unlike Claude Code!)
It's built around auto-accept by default. I want my agent to get as far as it can without my supervision, so I can review everything in one go at the end. There are two key things that codemcp does differently than most coding agents: we forbid unrestricted shell, instead requiring you to predeclare commands the agent can use in
codemcp.toml, and we Git version all LLM edits, so you can roll back agent changes on a fine-grained basis and don't have to worry about forgetting to commit changes.It's IDE agnostic: you ask Claude to make changes, it makes them, and then you can use your favorite IDE setup to review the changes and make further edits. I use vim as my daily driver editor, and coding environments that require VSCode or a specific editor are a turn off for me.
