Git Brain brings JetBrains-style Git tooling and an MCP server to VS Code and Cursor

A JetBrains-style Git client lands in VS Code

A new extension called Git Brain aims to recreate the integrated Git experience familiar from JetBrains IDEs inside Visual Studio Code and the growing family of editors built on it. According to a dev.to announcement published September 13 by Ariel Livshits, one of the developers behind the tool, the extension runs in VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium, Antigravity, Trae and Kiro, and is explicitly positioned as an alternative to GitLens for everyday Git work.

The project grew out of a personal frustration, Livshits writes: even with AI assistants handling much of the coding, routine Git tasks still meant hopping between a terminal, separate history views and other tools, and stashed changes that were easy to forget about. The stated goal is to gather the common workflow into one visual workspace that makes Git's behaviour legible, not to replace Git itself.

Visual graph, history and a three-way merge editor

At the centre is a visual commit graph showing branches, merges and tags, with filtering, commit details and file diffs available in the same view. Developers can inspect a commit, see which files changed and jump straight into a diff. The extension also covers commit and file history, side-by-side diffs, branch management, stashes, and what the announcement describes as smart checkout and pull workflows.

Merge conflicts get a dedicated three-way editor with local, result and remote panes, so users can compare both sides, take one or both, edit the result and move between conflicts visually instead of wrangling raw conflict markers. Livshits says this part of the tool is heavily influenced by the Git tooling found in full IDEs.

AI features built around the Git workflow

The announcement argues that AI has made Git more important, not less: agents generate code faster, which produces larger and more tangled diffs, more parallel branches and worktrees, more conflicts, and commits that no human wrote line by line. In response, Git Brain adds AI tooling around the workflow itself. It can analyse a messy working tree and propose how to split the changes into logical commits for review, generate commit messages, summarise changes, draft pull request descriptions and help resolve conflicts.

An MCP server so coding agents understand the repository

Alongside the human-facing UI, Git Brain ships a built-in MCP server. Tools such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, plus other MCP-compatible agents, can use it to query repository status, branches, diffs, commit history, unpushed changes, conflicts, stashes and worktrees as a structured view of repository state, rather than having the agent guess its way through shell commands. Livshits stresses that the server exposes specific Git capabilities with guardrails around mutations and destructive actions, instead of granting broad access to the machine.

Worktrees get a visual panel

Git worktrees, which let several branches be checked out simultaneously, receive their own panel for creating, inspecting, opening and removing them without memorising CLI commands. The announcement frames this as increasingly relevant in an agent-driven workflow, where a main branch, a feature branch, a production fix and an agent experiment may all need to stay alive at once.

Traction and the GitLens comparison

On the frequent question of whether it replaces GitLens, the team's answer is yes for users who want a fast, visual experience centred on daily workflows, though the larger ambition differs: humans get a polished interface, agents get structured Git capabilities, and both operate on the same repository state. The post is candid that GitLens has done a lot for Git inside VS Code. According to the announcement, Git Brain has already passed 70,000 downloads on Open VSX.

Why it matters

Two shifts make this launch worth watching. First, AI coding agents have increased the volume of commits, diffs and merge conflicts a developer must triage, which turns Git's interface, long a relative weak spot in VS Code compared with JetBrains IDEs, back into a genuine bottleneck. Second, the built-in MCP server points at an emerging pattern: rather than letting agents run arbitrary shell commands, tools are beginning to expose scoped, guarded interfaces to repository state, which could become a meaningful safety layer as agents gain autonomy. One caveat applies: the feature claims and download figures come from the vendor's own announcement, so anyone considering a switch from GitLens should test it against their own workflow first.