That's also what I'm using and for the same reasons. Defender's protection is fine according to testing, but the IO performance is insanely bad. I wouldn't both

That's also what I'm using and for the same reasons. Defender's protection is fine according to testing, but the IO performance is insanely bad. I wouldn't bother with running ESET's AV if Defender didn't slow heavy disk IO operations to a crawl. And I'm not excluding any development directories because malicious code can come in either as part of the project I just pulled down from github or from pulling in one of its dependencies from a package index.