^ This. Also, I am super satisfied with how the market is finally moving away from bloated electron apps. We have covered Cursor for the AI-first crowd and PyCharm for the power users already, but if your laptop is legit struggling with RAM, you gotta look at these alternatives:

• Zed Industries Zed Code Editor v0.14x
• It is written in Rust and the performance data shows it is way faster than VS Code. It has native DeepSeek support now in the models list. No complaints here, it is buttery smooth.
• Neovim Open Source Editor v0.10.0
• It is basically free and uses almost zero resources. You can hook it up to DeepSeek via the "avante.nvim" plugin if you are okay with a slight learning curve. I have been using Zed for my last few projects and it just works well without turning my fan into a jet engine. Since you need to finish by this weekend for your dads shop, Zed is probably the fastest way to get moving without fighting your IDE lag.

Wait, I gotta jump in because I just ran some benchmarks on this! @Reply #1 - good point about Cursor, but if you want to keep your RAM usage low while pushing DeepSeek to its limits, you seriously need to check out Continue.dev Open Source AI Plugin inside JetBrains PyCharm Community Edition. It handles context windows so much better than the standard VSCode extensions!!

• It is 100% free!
• You get full control over the config to optimize your API calls.
• The indexing is incredible for project-wide logic. I love it because you can see the token counts and latency stats in real-time... basically nerd heaven. Also, look at the Aider AI Coding Assistant if you want to go terminal-style. It uses almost zero RAM and integrates with DeepSeek perfectly. Check out their GitHub for the setup guide, honestly it is amazing for speed!

Facts.

Man, I feel your pain. I actually nearly lost a client last month because my environment kept hanging while trying to fetch completions. It was a total nightmare. If you want something that actually works without turning your laptop into a space heater, you might want to consider Cursor AI Code Editor Free Version. Cursor is a fork that handles the AI indexing way better than any extension you'll find for VSCode. I would suggest being careful with your indexing settings tho, as it can still hog resources if you let it scan every single file in a massive project. Heres what I would look into:

• Cursor AI Code Editor Free Version is basically the industry standard for this right now and is super stable.
• Zed Industries Zed Code Editor for macOS and Linux is insanely fast and uses way less RAM if you want something lightweight. Just make sure to keep an eye on your background processes... I learned the hard way that one bad config can ruin your whole weekend.