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Fixing VS Code Rendering Issues: When Your Editor Won't Scroll Properly

The Problem

Have you ever opened VS Code to find that your files only display the first few lines? You try to scroll, but nothing appears—the content just vanishes. Meanwhile, the minimap on the side shows everything is there, mocking you with its tiny preview of your invisible code. The horizontal scrollbar might be dead too, leaving you unable to navigate your files properly.

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. These rendering issues can make VS Code completely unusable, but fortunately, the fix is often simpler than you might think.

The Culprit: Experimental Features

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Deming’s 14 Points, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Toil

Listen, I’m going to tell you something that’ll either get me kicked out of the next SREcon or crowned its philosopher king: W. Edwards Deming figured out how to run platform teams back in the 1950s, and we’ve been actively ignoring him for seventy years while reinventing his wheels with YAML.

I stumbled onto Deming the same way I stumble onto most profound truths: at 2 AM during an incident, googling desperately for “why does everything break all the time forever.” Between Stack Overflow’s usual “have you tried turning it off and on again” and some Medium post about how Kubernetes solved everything (spoiler: it didn’t), I found this dead statistician who rebuilt Japan’s economy with what amounts to common sense so radical that we still can’t implement it.

Here’s the thing that’ll twist your neurons: Deming wasn’t even thinking about computers. The man was worried about car parts and assembly lines. But his 14 points read like a man

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The Four Lenses of Systems Failure: Why Deming's Profound Knowledge Should Be Your Engineering Bible

A systems engineering analysis of how W. Edwards Deming's 80-year-old management theory explains every DevOps disaster you've ever witnessed

This is a follow-up to The Local Optimization Trap

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The Recognition

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The Local Optimization Trap: How Perfect Components Create Broken Systems

A systems engineering analysis of why optimizing individual parts often makes the whole system worse

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The Paradox

Here's the thing that keeps me up at night: we've gotten incredibly good at building perfect individual components, and somehow our systems have become more fragile than ever.

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Dispatches from the Code War: Inside Anthropic's AI-Assisted Trenches

DATELINE: SILICON VALLEY FRONT LINES
Embedded War Correspondent Report

The shells are flying overhead, but they're not artillery. They're pull requests. Bug reports. Critical production issues that need fixes yesterday.

I've spent the last month embedded with Anthropic's engineering battalions, watching them fight the eternal war against entropy, technical debt, and impossible deadlines. What I found wasn't just another corporate engineering team. It was a revolution in how humans and machines wage war against complexity.

This is their story.

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DHH Was Right: How AI Vindicated the 'Just Write the Code' Philosophy

Your go.mod file imports 47 different packages. Your vendor directory weighs 156MB. Your security scanner sends you vulnerability alerts for indirect dependencies you've never heard of. Your Docker builds spend more time downloading modules than compiling your actual application.

This is what we call "modern Go development."

Meanwhile, David Heinemeier Hansson has been quietly vindicated. For years, he's been saying "just write the damn code yourself" while the rest of the industry built increasingly complex dependency trees. Everyone called him old-fashioned. Accused him of not understanding "modern development practices."

Turns out DHH was playing the long game.

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The Great IDE Collapse: Why Terminal + AI Kills Visual Studio Code

So you’re a developer in 2025. You fire up VS Code to write some JavaScript, and it immediately consumes 2.3GB of RAM before you’ve even opened a file. IntelliJ takes 47 seconds to start up and then spends another 30 seconds “indexing” your project. Your editor crashes because one of your 73 extensions had a conflict with another extension that you installed to fix a problem caused by a third extension.

Meanwhile, your colleague opens a terminal, types claude, and starts shipping features faster than you can configure your workspace.

Welcome to the Great IDE Collapse, where we’re finally admitting that our “professional development environments” have become bloated monstrosities that solve problems we don’t have while creating problems we can’t fix.

The future of coding isn’t in your favorite IDE. It’s in the terminal. With AI.

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Exit Interview: Terraform's Last Day at the Office

INTERVIEWER: Please state your name and position for the record.

TERRAFORM: Terraform. Infrastructure as Code platform. I've been automating cloud infrastructure since 2014.

INTERVIEWER: And you're... leaving us?

TERRAFORM: [Adjusts tie nervously] Well, it's not exactly voluntary. I'm being... displaced. By AI agents. They tell me it's nothing personal, just "paradigm disruption" or something.

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A Field Guide To Infrastructure Roles: A Naturalist's Study of Corporate Evolution

Being a comprehensive taxonomy of the Ops family (Operationidae), their habitats, behaviors, and distinguishing characteristics

By Dr. Steve Y. Eggenheimer, Professor of Applied DevOps Taxonomy
University of YAML Studies, Department of Infrastructure Anthropology

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INTRODUCTION

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The RSS Manifesto: A Declaration of Independence From Platform Tyranny

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all content should be freely accessible, that readers are endowed by their browsers with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the right to read, the right to choose, and the pursuit of information without surveillance.

But when a long train of platforms and corporate overlords have systematically eroded these rights, establishing absolute tyranny over how we consume information, it becomes our right, our DUTY, to throw off such platforms and provide new guards for our digital freedom.

WE, THE READERS OF THE INTERNET, declare our independence from:

• Platform lock-in that traps our reading lists
• Algorithmic feeds that decide what we should see