Tired of squinting at VS Code’s stacked merge editor?
The problem
We’ve all been there.
You’re halfway through a rebase. Git stops. Twelve files are conflicted. You open one in VS Code… and get that familiar stacked layout: Incoming, Current, and a result pane that somehow still feels like a puzzle with half the pieces missing.
If you ever used WebStorm or IntelliJ, you know how good merge tools can feel:
- Your side on the left
- Their side on the right
- The result in the middle
- Gutter arrows that just… work
In VS Code land, that flow never quite arrived. You click Accept Current, Accept Incoming, Accept Both, and hope nothing important got flattened. Word-level diffs? Authorship? A clear “who wrote this chunk?” signal? Often missing when you need them most.
And when AI entered the chat, a lot of tools treated conflicts like isolated text blobs:
“Here are the
<<<<<<<markers. Good luck.”
But real merges need context. What was the branch trying to do? What does the surrounding file look like? Who touched this last? Without that, “AI resolve” is just confident guessing.
I wanted the JetBrains merge experience — inside VS Code and Cursor — with an assistant that behaves more like a careful teammate than a slot machine.
So I built it.
The solution: MergeForge
AI that reads your repo, not just the conflict markers
Explain conflicts, resolve them into the result pane, or Fix all (safe mechanical merges first, model only on the red chunks). The model can use read-only tools — open files, search code, inspect history, look up symbols — and you see live ⚙ activity so nothing is a black box.
Works with:
GitHub Copilot in VS Code (Language Model API) out of the box- Or your own key for Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Kimi/Moonshot, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (OpenRouter, local Ollama, proxies)
Keys live in VS Code secret storage. Nothing hits git until you hit Apply. Unhappy with an AI edit? Undo that chunk like any other change.
Built with care (and tests)
MergeForge is TypeScript end to end:
VS Code Extension API for commands, SCM, secret storage, and Copilot LM integration
Monaco Editor inside the webview for the three panes
node-diff3 + a custom chunking engine checked against realgit merge-fileoutput
Vercel AI SDK for multi-provider streaming and tool use
esbuild for the extension + webview bundles
Vitest for unit, git-parity, and end-to-end tests
The correctness bar matters: where git merges cleanly, MergeForge aims to match git byte for byte. There’s also a replay eval for the AI pipeline so prompt changes can be regression-checked against real historical merges.
git clone https://github.com/ognjenmarcheta/merge-forge.git
cd merge-forge
pnpm install
pnpm test
pnpm run watch # then F5 to launch the Extension Development Host
Open source & contributions welcome
MergeForge is MIT-licensed and fully open source.
Repo:
VS Code
Source, issues, stars
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