One of the very first thing you should do is stop using vscode’s terminal.
Use something like Rex, Ghostty, kitty or whatever floats your boat.
You will have a much better experience.
I use the terminal for most of my agentic workflows.
I still use vscode, but only for diffing and the proprietary devcontainer stuff.
Much less memory usage, too; each "vscode" window/tab takes a few GB, a claude in a terminal is 200mb.