Visual Studio Code source control panel breaks at random

Question

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but the number of times VSCode features 'randomly' behave differently (or not at all) for me seems unacceptably high...

Today, out of the blue, changes were not seen by the source control panel (plugin?). e.g.

• no change highlighting in the python file,
• python file not listed under changes,
• source control bubble showing the wrong number of changed files.

I tried to click 'refresh' on the top right of the source control panel but no joy. In the end I simply restarted vs-code and it was fixed. e.g. none of the more detailed / specific fixes for similar problems found elsewhere on stack overflow were needed.

This is a symptom of more general 'instability' in vs-code for me, which could indicate an entirely different cause of the problem rather than something specific to 'broken source control panel'. However, when I attempted to list the various ways in which I'm seeing vs-code flake out, the lovely moderators deleted my question.

kthxbi