wtf is claude-deck?

Claude Deck turns a physical Elgato Stream Deck Plus into a set of knobs for the Claude Code coding assistant inside VS Code. The Stream Deck Plus is a specific piece of hardware with four rotary dials and a small touch screen strip above them. This project only works with that model, not the button only Stream Decks. Two dials matter here. One dial controls which AI model the current chat tab is using, so turning the knob switches models for whatever conversation you have open. The other dial controls reasoning effort, moving through levels from low up to max. Pressing either dial sends the compact command, which shrinks a long conversation down. Small screens on the dials show the current model and effort level so you always know what is active. The model dial follows whichever chat tab you are actually looking at, and switches its display when you change tabs. The effort setting is shared across all chats rather than per conversation, and the tool is upfront about that limitation on its display. Every change the dial makes is checked by reading the actual saved value back from disk afterward, rather than trusting a success signal that might not reflect what really happened. Beyond VS Code, there is also a separate terminal launcher that lets the compact command work in a plain terminal window running the Claude command line tool, without needing the patched editor extension at all. This project is unofficial and not affiliated with Anthropic or Elgato. It works by applying a local, reversible patch to the already installed Claude Code extension on your own machine, since there is no official way to control these settings. That patch can break whenever the extension updates and needs to be reapplied by hand. It requires Node version 20 or higher and currently runs on Windows, with Mac support still experimental and Linux untested.