Letting AI agents use the VSCode Julia REPL

General Usage
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Hi all, recently the julia-vscode devs added the ability for VSCode Copilot to run code in the integrated Julia REPL. I made a small addon extension which also lets all the other agentic tools like the native Claude/Codex VSCode extensions (or their TUI / desktop counterparts entirely outside of VSCode for that matter) drive your integrated Julia REPL via MCP.

Check it out here: Julia VSCode MCP (unofficial) - Visual Studio Marketplace

I’ve found the whole integrated terminal thing pretty awesome, since the agent can just iterate in the running terminal, inspecting variables, tweaking code, etc… its so much faster than it only being able to run one-off Julia commands via bash like it currently does. If you do agentic coding, I highly recommend trying this out (with this extension if you need it, or just the Copilot support already built into the official extension).

4 Likes
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Hello, have you discussed integrating this into the main vscode Julia extension?

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Yea, see the discussion starting here, basically we just don’t know yet from upstream what the “right way” to do this is (and may not for a while), until then this extension is a stopgap, ideally it won’t be needed in the future.