2 months ago

Exploring the NEW Convex Claude Code Plugin!

Hot on the heels of our Codeex integration, we've got some good news for Claude Code users out there. The brand new Claude Code plugin is now available and really very good. In my opinion, it's even a little bit better than the Codeex one as it integrates a bit deeper with Claude. Let's take a look. All right, to get started with it, the first thing you need to do is to install the plugin. So, you can do that from the claw desktop app by going to customize and then personal plugins. Click browse plugins and then just type in convex. There you go. It's right there. And I've already got it installed. So, it shows up here on the left hand side. Alternatively, you can open up claude from the CLI and type forward slashplugin and then search for convex. Now, I have already got it installed, so it's not showing in discover, but you can see that it's installed in the installed category. But I'm more of a UI kind of guy than a terminal kind of guy. So, I'm going to go back to the desktop app where I feel much more comfortable. Now, I ran this earlier and I want to show you the output first because it's really quite impressive. So, what I asked to do was build a collaborative drawing application that's going to be for my family and it's going to run on each other's devices. So, the idea is that we're going to be able to draw a daily whiteboard and see that whiteboard and we can kind of message each other on there and then it kind of gets wiped the next day. Now notice nowhere in this prompt here did I mention the word convex which is incredible because this plugin is able to I mean claude code is able to activate the plug-in itself without you having to invoke it unlike with the codeex one you have to explicitly say at [music] convex to be able to invoke the plugin with claude it's smart enough to know when to invoke convex or not and you can see right here it says cool great project for convex so it knew immediately to use convex and then to pull and the skill that comes with a plug-in. It then went ahead and asked me a few questions what kind of like technologies I want to use and family passwords and things like that which were really nice questions, very insightful. Codeex didn't do this by the way, but very very nice. Helped me kind of flesh out the project a little bit more and then went ahead and built it. I think it took about 10 15 minutes and um yeah, very impressive result. Let's have a look. Yes, the other thing is it also used the in-built browser as well to validate that everything worked itself which is quite nice. But you can see here we have this whiteboard here where I can uh it's using TL draw and you can draw things [music] on here and then you can go to previous days and you've got a new new fresh whiteboard and go [music] back to today. The question is though is it real time? Is it using convex? Let's find out. I'll open up a browser. So if I open up it's the first page it's going to give me is going to ask me for a family password. I'll type family cuz I think that's the default password. Yeah, sure. I'll play as mom today. And bam, there we go. It's loaded up our whiteboard. Now, if I put it along to the side and I draw here. Hey, it shows up over there. And over here, if I draw Oops. I guess that's not going to work. [music] Anyway, if I draw on this one, it should be fine. Yeah, there we go. Shows up. And over here. Yeah, shows up over there. Okay, cool. All right. So we've seen that we can now build a convex project from scratch even without saying the word convex and it works really really well really really well. But I want to now give it a slightly harder task. I want to be able to convert from an existing superbase project over to convex using the plugin. Let's see see how well it does. So the first thing we're going to need is a superbase project. So I'm going to see if I can prompt my way to a superbase project first. Hey, can you build a Superbase project [music] that's going to be a pocket money tracking app for my family? I'm going to be able to it's going to be very simple. I'm going to be able to log in and [music] record different jobs that my son has done and their amount value. [music] And then it's going to provide me a running summary at the end of the week of the amount of money that he should be paid. Let's see how that does. All right, it's done. But it's not running. Uh, it needs me to create a superb base project. SQI SQ editor paste. Okay. All right. H, I missed Convex already. All right. Give me a second. Can't you just do the the project setup from the Superbase CLI? Oh, God. Really? You can't create superbase projects from the CLI? Okay. All right. I will do this manually then. All right. Well, that was more painful than it should have been, but anyway, I think it's now done. It won't open up in the preview for some reason, but it is open here. So, let's have a look. Pocket money. Sign in. Okay. Um, okay. So, there we are. We're now logged in. Huzzah. Job. Uh, picked up clothes. Sure. $10. He's skin. He's not going to get $10. Oh, there we go. It added it. Now the question is, is it going to be real time or not? Mode the lawn amount $5. No, you only got the picture of the clothes, but didn't do the mode lawn. So, I have to refresh to get that one. Do I? Okay. I'm not sure why Helium's not doing that. Okay. Yes, you have to refresh to get it. Okay, so yeah, it's not using the real timeess of Superbase, but I think that's just by default these days. But anyway, I don't want to debug why Superbass is not working as I would like it to. What I want to do is see whether we can just go the simple path and just use convex. Okay, now I want to convert the Superbase project to use convex. Let's see. Superbass. Uh my uh speech to text is not perfect. Yeah. So it's already picking up that orth is going to be the big issue here. So yeah, we'll just do convex or with uh email and password. Yeah, that's definitely the easiest. Yeah, that's the one thing honestly like is the convex or situation. [music] We're actively working on it, but it is still like superbase is just better at or right now. And same with Firebase to be honest. It just needs to be easier on Convex, but we're working on it, promise. All right, so it says it's done. Let's have a look. All right, so it's asking me to log in. Find my at convex.dev. Oh, we haven't got a account. Create one. Password always secure. Create account. Oh dear, not working. Why is it not working? Let's have a look. Fail to authenticate. No author provider found match in the given token. Oh dear. All right, pass this to Claude. Where are you? Hey, I can't log in. I'm getting this error in the console. Can you investigate, please? Such is the way with orth. All right, supposedly it was just a stupid mistake. It was uh using an untyped process. [music] En it does this quite a lot actually. I need to get on fix this. But anyway, so this should now work. If I click create account, huzzah, we are in get rid of this. Okay, now the big question. If I open it up on both sides and I say mowed the lawn for $1, add it on this side. Yay, shows up on both sides. Okay, clean clothes. Yay, it shows up on both sides. Fantastic. So, our application is now convexified and real time. Now, one last thing I want to have a look at is just what actually comes with the plug-in. So, if we open up customize, we go to convex. We can actually see [music] that it's got some design skills, which I've seen it using. Um, some connectors. I'm not entirely sure what these are, but it looks like it's basically going to start the Convex MCP server, so I guess it can do stuff without necessarily interfacing with the CLI. By the way, our MCP server is pretty fully featured, but it's not got 100% of the things that the CLI's got on it, which is one of the reasons why I prefer using the CLI over MCP these days. agents. I've seen it using this one quite a lot. So there's Convex expert. So this is obviously an agent that's able to build convex code using the convex guidelines as the base of its knowledge and hooks. So post tool use. [music] So it's going to do the type checking process by the looks of things after it's written some code or edited code. Very very cool. All right. So there you have it. the Convex Claw Code plugin. I very strongly recommend you use it if you're using Claude Code because it's going to be the surface that we're going to use going forward to continually update and add new features as anthropic add more abilities to plugins. We're going to keep upgrading that [music] and adding more interfaces into Claude Code, hopefully improving the experience for people who want to build comics projects. But anyway, that's enough for me for today. Until next time, thanks for watching. Cheerio.

Hot on the heels of our Codex integration, there's good news for Claude Code users. The new Convex Claude Code plugin is out, and it's good. Better than the Codex one, I'd say, because it hooks into Claude more deeply. Here's what that looks like in practice.

Installing the plugin

From the desktop app:

Open Customize, then Personal Plugins.
Click Browse Plugins.
Search for Convex.

It shows up right there.

From the CLI: open Claude, type /plugin, and search the same way.

I'm more of a UI person than a terminal person, so I did the rest from the desktop app.

A drawing app, without ever saying "Convex"

I asked Claude Code to build a collaborative drawing app for my family: a daily whiteboard everyone could draw on and message each other through, one that resets every day. Convex never came up in that prompt. That's the interesting part.

Claude Code worked out on its own that this was a good fit for Convex and pulled in the skill that ships with the plugin. It said something like "great project for Convex," then asked me a handful of clarifying questions about which technologies I wanted and how the family password should work.

The Codex integration doesn't do that. It sits there until you type @Convex.

Diagram comparing Claude Code and Convex

It took about 10 to 15 minutes to build, and it used its built-in browser to validate the result before handing it back. The app uses tldraw for the whiteboard itself, and you can flip between days to get a fresh canvas. To check whether it was really real time, I opened it side by side as two different family members, signed in with the shared family password, and drew on one side. It appeared on the other instantly.

A harder test: migrating Supabase to Convex

Building something Convex-shaped from scratch is one test. I wanted a messier, more realistic one: take an existing Supabase app and convert it over.

First I needed a Supabase app, so I prompted my way to one. A simple pocket-money tracker where my son logs the jobs he's done and their amounts, with a running weekly total. It built fine. It wouldn't run, though, until I manually created a Supabase project and pasted SQL into their editor myself. You can't spin up a Supabase project from the CLI the way you can with Convex. I missed Convex almost immediately. That setup friction is just what building on Supabase involves and AI-assisted coding didn't introduce it, but it stood out by comparison.

Once it was running I tested the sync. I logged one job on one screen and it appeared. I logged a second, "mowed the lawn," and this time nothing showed up on the other screen until I refreshed by hand. The generated app wasn't using Supabase's real-time features by default, so live updates would have meant going in and wiring that up myself. Rather than debug that, I asked Claude Code to convert the whole thing to Convex.

Debugging the auth error

Even before I finished describing the migration, Claude Code had picked up that authentication would be the hard part. It suggested Convex Auth with email and password, the simplest option to wire up. Auth is the one area where Supabase (and Firebase, for that matter) is still ahead of Convex today. We're working on making it easier. Right now it isn't the smoothest part of the experience.

That showed up almost immediately. I tried creating an account and got "Failed to authenticate: No auth provider found matching the given token." I handed the console error back to Claude Code and asked it to investigate.

It came back with a small, stupid mistake. The secret was being read through the untyped process.env side of Convex's environment variable system.

1// Reads as string | undefined, no validation, typos slip through to runtime
2const authSecret = process.env.AUTH_SECRET;
3

Convex lets you declare environment variables with a validator so they come back through a generated, typed env object instead.

1// convex/convex.config.ts
2const app = defineApp({
3  env: {
4    AUTH_SECRET: v.string(),
5  },
6});
7
8// anywhere under convex/
9import { query, env } from "./_generated/server";
10env.AUTH_SECRET; // typed as string, validated at deploy time
11

Claude Code fixed it, I created an account, and it worked. Then came the real test. I opened the app on two screens, logged "mow the lawn" for $1 on one side, and it appeared on both immediately. Same with the next entry.

That's three sync tests across the two builds:

What I tested	Live sync?
Drawing app, built on Convex from a single prompt	Yes. Drew on one screen, it appeared on the other.
Pocket-money app, generated on Supabase	No. "Mowed the lawn" sat there until I refreshed by hand.
The same app after Claude Code migrated it to Convex	Yes. Both entries landed on both screens right away.

The app was properly convexified and syncing live, which was the whole point of the migration.

What's inside the plugin

Open Customize, look at the Convex plugin's own settings, and you can see what it's built from.

Piece	What it does
Design skills	The Convex guidance Claude Code pulls in on its own. I watched it reach for these across both builds.
Connectors	I'm not entirely sure. From the settings it looks like they start the Convex MCP server.
MCP server	Lets the model introspect a deployment's tables and functions, and run queries, without shelling out to the CLI for everything.
Convex Expert agent	Writes Convex code grounded in Convex's own guidelines rather than general training knowledge. It got invoked constantly.
Hooks	Run after every tool use, type-checking automatically whenever the model writes or edits code.

Our MCP server is pretty fully featured, though it still doesn't cover 100% of what the CLI can do. That's one reason I reach for the CLI more often than MCP these days.

Between the autonomous activation, the dedicated agent, and the type-checking hooks, this plugin is going to be the main surface we use to keep improving the Claude Code experience for Convex. We'll add more integrations as Anthropic extends what plugins can do. If you're using Claude Code with Convex, install it.

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