The Missing Sidebar in Cursor

When I’m working with AI agents, I spend most of my time reviewing changes. Not individual commits. Not unstaged files. The only thing I care about is the full diff between my branch and main. What changed? What files were touched? That’s it.

The Source Control panel in Cursor/VS Code is fine for what it does. Unstaged changes, staged changes, commit-by-commit diffs. But it doesn’t show you the full picture between your branch and main. I tried git-lens for this. Hated it. Too much noise, too many features I didn’t need. So I built my own.

git-compare is a Cursor/VS Code extension that does one thing: it shows a sidebar with the full list of changed files between your branch and main. That’s it. No commit history, no blame annotations, no timeline. Just the files that changed, grouped by directory, with color-coded status icons. Click a file, get a side-by-side diff.

Here’s why this matters more now than it would have two years ago. When you’re steering AI agents, the unit of work isn’t a single file edit. It’s a branch. The agent makes changes across multiple files, and you need to see all of them at once to understand what happened. You need to review the full scope of the changes, catch things the agent missed, and verify that everything makes sense together.

The built-in source control panel in VS Code shows you unstaged and staged changes. But when you’re working with agents, you commit frequently to create save points you can roll back to. After a few commits, the source control panel is empty. Everything is committed. You have no view of what actually changed on this branch. The staging area becomes irrelevant. What you care about is the full delta between your branch and main.

That’s what git-compare shows you. Always visible in the sidebar. Always up to date. One glance and you know exactly what’s different from main.

The source code is on GitHub.