VS Code leaves stale workspace data and profile entries behind
Developers who frequently create workspaces can accumulate large amounts of VS Code workspace state after those workspaces are gone, and the reported cleanup options are limited or hard to find. One user reported 35 GB of old workspace files, while another resorted to editing a profile file manually. A Nextcloud signal describes a related but separate server-side orphan-data problem; the strongest shared opportunity is VS Code cleanup.
For developers who frequently create and remove VS Code workspaces. Mentioned from Aug 2017 to Mar 2025 on GitHub.
4 different people described this problem in 3 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 3.0/10
- Pain
- 5.0/10
- Frequency
- 5.8/10
- Willingness to pay
- 0.0/10
- Momentum
- 5.0/10
- Who pays
- Professionals
- Competition
- Medium
- Build difficulty
- Medium
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
I just noticed this directory is 35GB on my laptop, with some of the oldest workspaces being nearly a year old and most of them no longer existing (I tend to a roll out a new workspace per feature branch on one project I work on)
So we need some UI affordance that point to large workspace storage folders and ask the user whether we should clean it up or not
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
- 1 product idea with the smallest useful version and pricing
- 3 places to find your first customers
- 2 more quotes from people who have this problem
- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks