I love me my Cline, Claude Code and company. But there’s major thing I found missing from them — I want my assistant to be able to step with me through a debugger, and be able to examine variables and call stack. Somehow this doesn’t exist. This is helpful for figuring out the flow of an unfamiliar program, for example.

Now, JetBrains MCP Server Plugin gets some of the way there, but… It can set breakpoints but because of the way it analyzes code text it often gets confused. For example, when asked to set a breakpoint on the first line of the method it would do it at a method signature or annotation.

And it doesn’t do anything in terms of examining the code state at a breakpoint.

So I decided to build on top of it, see JetBrains-Voitta plugin (based on a Demo Plugin). It:

• Uses IntelliJ PSI API to provide more meaningful code structure to the LLM (as AST)
  • This helps with properly setting breakpoints from verbal instructions
  • Hopefully also this should prevent some hallucinations about methods that do not exit (educated guess).
• Adds more debugging capability, such as inspecting the call stack and variables at a given breakpoint.
  
  Here are a couple of example debug sessions:

• Session 1
• Session 2

Much better.

And completely vibe-coded.

Maybe do something with Cline next?