Taming the Marketplace
VS Code's extension marketplace has tens of thousands of extensions. Installing everything that looks useful is tempting, but each active extension consumes memory and CPU. An editor with 80 extensions enabled simultaneously will feel sluggish. The solution is intentional, project-scoped extension management.
Workspace Recommendations
A repository-committed extensions file declares which extensions the project requires, by ID. When a new team member opens the repository, VS Code reads this file and displays a notification: "This workspace has extension recommendations. Would you like to install them?" One click installs everything. This replaces the "make sure you have the Terraform extension installed" line in your README.
Commit this file to your repository. It is infrastructure, not a personal preference file.
Profiles
VS Code Profiles (accessible via File > Preferences > Profiles) let you create named sets of settings, keybindings, and enabled extensions. You switch between profiles the way you switch between browser profiles.
Practical profiles for an Ops engineer:
| Profile | Enabled Extensions |
|---|---|
| DevOps | Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, YAML, AWS Toolkit |
| Python Dev | Python, Pylance, Jupyter, Black formatter |
| Frontend | ESLint, Prettier, Tailwind CSS IntelliSense |
| Minimal | Nothing extra — for quick edits on unfamiliar repos |
When you switch to the "DevOps" profile, all Frontend extensions are disabled. VS Code only loads what is relevant. Startup time drops, memory usage drops, and the UI is less cluttered.
Disable by Workspace
For finer control without creating a full profile, right-click any extension in the Extensions panel and select "Disable (Workspace)". This disables the extension only for the current project folder. The setting is stored in .vscode/settings.json and can be committed to the repo.
This is useful when a globally installed extension (like a spell checker) creates noise in a repository full of technical identifiers and configuration keys.