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Setting Up Power Claude in VS Code: a 10-Minute Walkthrough

Neural-LLM Admin 8 min read
Setting up Power Claude with Claude Code in VS Code walkthrough
Watch the whole setup — one command in the terminal you already have open, the Power Claude icon appears, a 7-day trial starts with no card, and local orchestration is ready.

Power Claude installs from the VS Code Marketplace in about a minute. Activating a license takes another minute. Adding accounts and seeing the first rotation happen lives in the next eight. This is the walkthrough — install, activate, configure, verify, plus the first-time gotchas that nobody mentions until they bite you.

Before you install

The extension assumes a working baseline. Verify the prerequisites are in place before installing — debugging an extension on top of a broken Claude Code setup wastes the most time.

  • VS Code 1.85 or later. Older versions are missing API surface the extension uses.
  • Claude Code already working on at least one account. If claude does not run from your terminal and complete a turn, fix that first. The extension layers on top of Claude Code; it does not replace it.
  • At least two Claude.ai accounts you can log into. Pooling one account is technically possible but defeats the point. The trial and Pro both support the accounts you need to rotate across.
  • Each account already authenticated with Claude Code on this machine. Run claude login once per account before the extension setup. The extension uses Claude Code's stored credentials — it does not collect them itself.

If any of these is missing, address it now. Each is a short fix; together they are the entire failure mode of a botched first install.

Install from the VS Code Marketplace (1 minute)

  1. Open VS Code.
  2. Open the Extensions sidebar (Ctrl+Shift+X on Linux/Windows, Cmd+Shift+X on macOS).
  3. Search for Power Claude.
  4. Confirm the publisher is neural-llm. Click Install.
  5. When prompted, reload the window to activate the extension.

Two things to watch for here:

  • The publisher name matters. "Power Claude" is descriptive enough that copycat extensions have appeared on the Marketplace in the past. The neural-llm publisher is the only one we ship from. Anything else is not us.
  • The reload prompt is required. If you skip it, the extension's hooks are not registered and the watchdog will not observe lifecycle events. Reload before configuring anything.

After reload, the Power Claude sidebar icon appears in the activity bar. Click it. You should see a license-activation pane and an accounts pane, both initially empty.

Activate your license (1 minute)

You have two paths here, depending on which tier you intend to use.

Free download — no key required to install. Install from the Marketplace and the 7-day free trial starts automatically — full Pro access, no credit card. If you already have a license key, paste it now. If you want to evaluate before committing, the trial is the right path.

Pro tier — paste key, or start the trial. Pro supports unlimited pooled accounts plus the full watchdog, Balanced Mode, and the cost analytics dashboard.

  1. If you already have a license key from neural-llm.com, paste it into the license-activation pane and click Activate. The license is validated against api.neural-llm.com and cached locally for twenty-four hours.
  2. If you do not have a key but want to evaluate Pro, click Start trial to begin the 14-day Premium Trial — $0 today, and you can cancel any time before day 15. The trial activates immediately and converts to Free at the end of the period unless you provide a key.

The license validation produces a status indicator: green ("Pro active" or "Trial active") or red ("Unlicensed"). The watchdog and rotation features key off this indicator — without an active license or trial, paid features are locked; the trial or a Pro license unlocks the full feature set.

Add your Claude accounts (3 minutes)

Each pooled account is a named profile pointing at credentials Claude Code has already stored on this machine. The extension reads from ~/.claude/credentials.json and its named-profile variants; it does not collect credentials itself.

  1. In the Accounts pane, click Add Account.
  2. Pick the account from the list of detected Claude Code profiles. If only one shows up, you have not run claude login for the second account yet — go do that, then return.
  3. Name the profile. The convention that works best is the email's local-part (the part before the @). So you@gmail.com becomes you, and you+work@gmail.com becomes you-work. Short names mean the status bar can display the active account at a glance.
  4. Repeat for each account you want in the pool.

Two configuration choices show up at this step:

  • Default pool. All accounts go into the rotation pool by default. If you want one account reserved (a "do not rotate" account for sensitive work), mark it as Reserved in the per-account settings. The rotator will never route to a reserved account; Claude Code uses it normally when explicitly selected.
  • Account priority. If your pool mixes Pro and Max accounts, you can mark Max accounts as preferred. The rotator will favor preferred accounts until they cap, then fall back. This is useful when you want the higher-headroom accounts to absorb most traffic.

The Accounts pane should now show two or more named profiles, each with a small status indicator: green (cool, ready to route), amber (warm, near cap), or red (capped, in cooldown).

Watch the first rotation (2 minutes)

The most satisfying part of the setup is watching the first rotation happen without the editor pausing. To trigger one:

  1. Open a project in VS Code. Any project with a CLAUDE.md is fine.
  2. Open Claude Code in the terminal: claude.
  3. Send a flurry of prompts that exercises sub-agents. A representative one:
   For each file in src/, spawn a sub-agent that lists the public methods. Aggregate the results.
  1. Watch the VS Code status bar. The active account name appears. As the fan-out runs and the active account warms, the indicator changes — you may see it shift to a second account mid-session.
  2. The conversation continues uninterrupted. There is no 429 banner. There is no editor pause. The rotation happened at the proxy layer between Claude Code and api.anthropic.com.

If the rotation did not happen and you did get a 429, something is misconfigured. Check the Accounts pane — both accounts should be green. Check the License pane — the rotator only acts on Pro or Free-with-two-accounts. If both check out and the rotation still did not happen, the extension log under VS Code's output panel (Power Claude channel) will have the diagnostic.

Verify the watchdog (2 minutes)

The watchdog is the second half of the extension. Its job is to keep your session alive across crashes, compacts, and rate-limit hangs.

  1. Open the Power Claude sidebar's Watchdog pane.
  2. You should see one entry per active Claude Code session, each with a heartbeat timestamp and a "healthy" status.
  3. Simulate a crash to verify recovery: close the VS Code window mid-session, then reopen.
  4. When the editor relaunches, the watchdog pane should offer a Resume previous session option. Click it.
  5. A new Claude Code session opens, pre-primed with the TodoWrite state and last known good context from the previous session.

If the resume button does not appear, the watchdog did not capture the previous session's state — most likely because the extension was installed mid-session and missed the PostToolUse hook subscriptions. Reload the window once and the next session will be captured correctly.

Common first-time gotchas

A short list of issues that catch new users:

  • Credentials file permissions. Claude Code expects ~/.claude/credentials.json to be 0600. A chmod 644 somewhere along the way (often from a script copying the file around) breaks both Claude Code itself and the extension's account detection.
  • Adding the same account twice. The extension does not deduplicate by email — it deduplicates by credential file path. If two profiles in ~/.claude point at the same account, they will appear as two pool entries but share one rate-limit bucket. The rotator will route between them and produce 429 storms.
  • Watchdog log location. Logs are in VS Code's output panel under the Power Claude channel, not under ~/.claude. When debugging, the output panel is the canonical source.
  • Cost dashboard takes a session to populate. The dashboard reads from the JSONL transcripts, and it needs at least one completed session to have data to display. A fresh install with no completed sessions yet will show an empty dashboard — this is expected.
  • claude resume behaves differently with the extension active. With the watchdog running, claude resume will prefer the watchdog's captured state over Claude Code's native session list. This is usually what you want, but it can confuse users who rely on the native resume semantics.

Two ways to start: download Power Claude free — the 7-day trial starts automatically, full Pro access, no credit card — or go straight to the 14-day Premium Trial for unlimited pooling, $0 today, cancel any time before day 15.

Frequently asked questions

Can I install Power Claude if I only have one Claude.ai account?

You can, but the rotator has nothing to rotate. The watchdog still works — it captures session state and offers one-click recovery from crashes regardless of pool size. A Pro license or active trial supports additional pooled accounts; if you only have one, the extension functions as a single-account watchdog without rotation.

Does Power Claude store my Anthropic credentials, or does it use Claude Code's stored credentials?

It uses Claude Code's stored credentials. The extension reads ~/.claude/credentials.json (and its named variants) and routes API traffic through a local proxy. It does not collect, store, or transmit credentials separately. Each pooled account's credentials stay where Claude Code put them.

What happens if I uninstall the extension — does it leave anything behind?

The extension deactivates the proxy and the watchdog cleanly on uninstall. The license activation record under ~/.power-claude/ persists in case you reinstall; you can delete the directory manually if you want a clean removal. Your Claude Code credentials and session transcripts are untouched.

Will Power Claude conflict with other Claude Code extensions or shell scripts?

The proxy lives on a local loopback port and only intercepts traffic addressed to api.anthropic.com. Other extensions that talk to different APIs are unaffected. Shell scripts that swap ~/.claude/credentials.json will fight with the rotator's sticky routing — pick one or the other, not both.

What happens if my trial or Pro license expires?

Open the License pane to add a new key. Without an active license, paid features lock — rotation, the watchdog, and analytics become unavailable until a valid license is active. Your profiles and session state are preserved; nothing is deleted.

Closing

Ten minutes is the typical install-and-verify time for a developer who already has Claude Code working and two paid accounts ready. The first rotation that happens without you noticing — that is the moment the install pays off. The Marketplace listing has the install link if you want to start now.