The memory footprint on these Electron-based tools is brutal. You spin up Claude Code and it's already sitting at like 500MB before you've even opened a file. Add a few extensions or have multiple projects running and suddenly you're looking at gigs of RAM gone just for your editor. VS Code has the same problem, people complain about it constantly but nothing changes because the whole ecosystem is built around that stack now. Some devs have switched to terminal-based setups or lightweight editors just to claw back system resources, but then you lose a lot of convenience features you've gotten used to.

Switching back to vim or something just to save RAM feels like going backwards when you're used to modern tooling. There's actually some folks trying to build alternatives to Claude Code right now. Saw something on GitHub written in Go that caught my eye, check it out here https://github.com/projectbarks/gopher-code . The whole point is it skips Node.js entirely, which cuts out a ton of the overhead that slows everything down and makes your system chug. Go compiles to a single binary so there's no massive node_modules folder taking up space or slowing launches. Worth testing it out to see if it runs lighter on your setup, might solve the sluggishness you're dealing with.