How to See What Claude Code Changed (Like Cascade)

You don’t need Cursor or Devin Desktop to watch an AI edit your code. Cascade, the agent that shipped in Windsurf, felt reassuring because you saw each change, accepted or rejected it, and undid it when it went wrong. Devin Desktop (Windsurf’s new name) removed Cascade on 8 September 2026 and now only offers its Devin Local agent, but the review flow people liked is easy to rebuild. That’s not magic; it’s a diff view over your files. Claude Code edits the real files on your disk, so your editor’s built-in Git tools (the Source Control panel) and the /diff command give you the exact same watch-review-undo flow. Set up once, and your normal editor becomes a review cockpit. Here’s how, in four steps.

Why people think Claude Code “hides” its changes

Most comparison articles file Claude Code under “terminal tool, no visual review” and Cursor or Devin Desktop under “nice diffs in the editor.” That framing has hardened into common wisdom, and it’s misleading. Claude Code isn’t writing to some hidden buffer. It’s saving to the same files VS Code already watches. The moment you pair it with git and your editor’s Source Control panel, you get a visual, line-by-line view of everything it touched. The capability was always there; nobody wires it together for beginners. Let’s do that.

Step 1: Open the project in VS Code and turn on git

Open your project folder in VS Code. Cursor and Devin Desktop (the editor formerly called Windsurf) work the same way: Anthropic’s docs list them as VS Code forks the Claude Code extension installs in. If the project isn’t already a git repository, make it one: run git init in the terminal, then make a first commit so you have a clean baseline. Git is the “save points” system, and it’s what makes “what changed?” answerable at all.

Step 2: Run Claude Code inside the editor

The simplest route is Anthropic’s Claude Code extension, which Anthropic recommends for VS Code: install it from the Extensions view and Claude gets its own panel in the editor. If you prefer the terminal, install the standalone Claude Code CLI, open the integrated terminal (Terminal → New Terminal) and run claude. Run that way, it installs the companion extension for you and connects to the editor; from an external terminal, type /ide to connect. Either way, Claude Code opens its edits in the editor’s diff view, with the old version and the new version side by side, just like Cascade. In Manual mode it asks before each edit, and since v2.1.275 you get Accept this change and Reject this change buttons under each change, so you can keep one hunk and drop the next.

Step 3: Watch the Source Control panel as it works

Click the Source Control icon in the left sidebar (the branch-shaped one). As Claude edits, every changed file appears here marked M (modified) or U (new). Click any file and VS Code shows a clean side-by-side diff: removed lines in red, added lines in green, with change markers in the gutter next to your code. This was the heart of the Cascade experience, and it’s a standard editor feature. It works because Claude changed real files. You’re not trusting the AI blindly; you’re reading exactly what it did.

For a review inside Claude Code itself, type /diff: it opens your uncommitted changes, Claude’s edits plus anything else you haven’t committed, and once Claude has edited files you can switch to the edits from a single turn. Review there before you commit.

Step 4: Keep, fix, or undo

Now you’re in control, the same three ways Cascade offered:

• Keep it: if the diff looks right, stage and commit it (the + next to a file in the Source Control panel stages it; write a short message and commit). That’s your new save point.
• Fix part of it: stage only the lines you want and discard the rest from the panel. Git lets you accept a change hunk by hunk.
• Undo it: if a whole step went wrong, press Esc twice with an empty prompt (or run /rewind) to roll back to an earlier checkpoint. You choose what to restore: the code, the conversation, or both.

The one honest caveat

Checkpoints and /rewind are a fast local undo, but they are not a replacement for git. They don’t track changes made by commands run in the terminal, edits you make outside Claude Code, or (in most cases) edits made by subagents, only Claude’s own file edits in your session. Snapshots are also cleaned up after about 30 days by default. So the durable habit is still: commit before you prompt, review the diff, commit again when you’re happy. Git is the seatbelt; checkpoints are the quick-undo button. Use both.

The per-change buttons live in the VS Code extension’s diff view, not in the plain terminal. If you work terminal-only, git staging gives you the same fine-grained control, and it’s honest about what’s really on disk.

Make Claude Code your first coding tool

If you’re setting this up for the first time, our free AI for Coders tool walks you through picking the right assistant for your project, gives you the exact install command for your operating system, and generates a starter rules file so Claude works the way you want from day one. Two minutes there saves an afternoon of guessing. And once you’ve got the four-click review flow above, you can let an AI agent edit your code while you watch every line it changes.

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