AI-calls-Editor
IDE-native refactoring for AI coding assistants
AI coding assistants are getting good at generating code. However, there are some refactoring operations, such as renaming a symbol across a codebase or moving a definition and updating its references/imports, which should be instant (and free), but instead often take a substantial amount of both time and tokens.
The problem is that most coding assistants approach refactoring with the usual:
Search for occurrences. This is often unreliable, especially in large projects, due to language features like scoped namespaces.
Read file sections.
Generate text patches.
Both (2) and (3) are expensive in terms of tokens.
A good AI assistant will often perform the above approach correctly through a multi-shot loop that involves linting, type-checking, and running tests (assuming it received good instructions), all of which add to token usage and time.
There’s a much better approach: use the IDE’s built-in refactoring engine. It’s correct, fast, and uses almost no tokens. Here’s the outline of the “AI-calls-Editor” approach for Claude Code and Visual Studio Code.
Create the MCP Extension. Open your project in Visual Studio Code, which has an Extension that runs a mini local MCP server. The MCP server can receive a file path, a line number, a column number, and the new name, and then rename a symbol with:
vscode.commands.executeCommand(”vscode.executeDocumentRenameProvider”, path, position, name)Register the MCP Server. Claude Code is informed about this capability with:
claude mcp add --transport http ai-calls-editor http://localhost:7272/mcpUsing the Capability. When Claude needs to rename a symbol, it only needs to figure out the parameters and make the call. It works.
Prototype: https://github.com/rokstrnisa/ai-calls-editor — contributions welcome!
Let’s save our tokens and our time.