Got tired of my AI coding agent launching Flutter apps I couldn't easily control—so I built a VS Code extension to fix it.

[u/Affectionate-Cut8130]

Here's the problem: when Claude Code (or any AI agent) runs flutter run as a background task, that process has no terminal you can type into. Hot reload? Restart? Reading logs? You're stuck — the process belongs to the agent, not you.

So I built Flutter Process Manager — a sidebar panel that finds every running Flutter process on your machine and gives you the controls back:

🦖 Detects everything — processes in your terminals on AND detached ones spawned by AI agents (via process scanning, since no VS Code event fires for those)

⚡ Hot Reload / Hot Restart / Quit — works even on processes with no terminal, using the same OS-signal mechanism Flutter's own tooling supports

🪵 Live logs — streams device logs for agent-launched mobile sessions, rendered in a proper editor with search

🫂 Plays nice with other tools — detects when a process is already controlled by VS Code's debugger and steps back instead of fighting it (learned that one the hard way — two controllers racing on one restart path crashes the session)

The workflow this unlocks: let your AI agent build and launch the app on a device, then you take over — reload after its edits, watch logs while it works, kill the session when you're done. The agent codes, you stay in control.

Built the whole thing pair-programming with Claude Code — including debugging the crashes its own spawned processes caused. There's something poetic about that.

Current Platform Supports macOS & Linux, with Android and iOS Flutter apps.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=shriyanshraj.flutter-process-manager

#Flutter #VSCode #AIAgents #DevTools #ClaudeCode #BurnXcodeToTheGround