How I Cut My VS Code Startup Time from 8.2s to 470ms — And Why Your settings.json Is Probably Sabotaging You
At 2:17 AM, during a a fintech startup I worked at production incident involving a cascading failure in our payments routing service, I had a 3-line fix ready — but couldn’t apply it. My VS Code froze for 11.3 seconds the moment I hit `Cmd+P` to open the command palette. Not “laggy.” Not “slow.” *Frozen.* CPU at 100%, cursor unresponsive, no keystrokes registered. I watched the macOS Activity Monitor while it hung — `Code Helper (Renderer)` process spiking, then holding steady at 1.2 GB RSS, `li...