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Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/22543
161•mystcb•1h ago

Comments

bachittle•1h ago
Yup it uses Apple Virtualization framework for virtualization. It makes it so I can't use the Claude Cowork within my VMs and that's when I found out it was running a VM, because it caused a nested VM error. All it does is limit functionality, add extra space and cause lag. A better sandbox environment would be Apple seatbelt, which is what OpenAI uses, but even that isn't perfect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283454
j16sdiz•37m ago
seatbelt is largely undocumented.
pluc•26m ago
just ask AI to document it
ramoz•16m ago
Not sure why you're getting down voted. This is totally reasonable.
blitzar•1h ago
The vibe coding giveth and the the vibe coding taketh away, blessed be the vibe coding
MarleTangible•1h ago
It's incredible how many applications abuse disk access.

In a similar fashion, Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB of podcasts for random reason and never deleted them. It even showed up as "System Data" and made me look for external drive solutions.

chuckadams•1h ago
Someone actually still uses the built-in podcasts app?
Angostura•1h ago
It's absolutely fine, from what I can tell
mister_mort•53m ago
AFAIK the native Podcast app for iPhone is the only way to make PC-phone podcast file syncing work. This stops you downloading the same podcast file twice, once on your PC and once on your phone.
hidelooktropic•51m ago
Not sure what you have against it. Works great for me. No subscription required. And if I do want to pay for ad free shows and support creators it's easy to do so.

Use whatever you like but I don't think Podcast app users are rare by any stretch of the imagination.

dewey•33m ago
It probably has more active users than all third party podcast apps on all mobile platforms combined. The power of defaults.
rafram•26m ago
It's generally a good app. People in the tech community like Overcast, but I've always found its UI completely illogical. Apple Podcasts is organized like I'd expect a podcast app to be.
kace91•57m ago
The system data issue on macOS is awful.

I use my MacBook for a mix of dev work and music production and between docker, music libraries, update caches and the like it’s not weird for me to have to go for a fresh install once every year or two.

Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.

John23832•50m ago
Seconding.

I should not have to hack through /Libary files to regain data on a TB drive because Osx wanted to put 200gbs of crap there in an opaque manner and not give the user ANY direct way to regain their space.

dotxlem•48m ago
I had the same problem and had some luck cleaning things up by enabling "calculate all sizes" in Finder, which will show you the total directory size, and makes it a bit easier to look for where the big stuff is hiding. You'll also want to make sure to look through hidden directories like ~/Library; I found a bunch of Docker-related stuff in there which turned out to be where a lot of my disk space went.

You can enable "calculate all sizes" in Finder with Cmd+J. I think it only works in list view however.

robin_reala•32m ago
I’d recommend GrandPerspective:[1] it’s really good at displaying this sort of thing, has been around for over two decades, and the developer has managed to keep it to <5MB which is perfect when you’re running very low on space.

[1] https://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

1e1a•26m ago
You can also just use du -hs, eg. to show the size of all subdirectories under ~/Library/Caches/ do:

  du -hs ~/Library/Caches/*
prmph•20m ago
A ton of thanks. This "hack" allowed to finally see some stuff that was eating up a lot of my space and was showing up as "System Data". It turned out the Podman virtual machine on my MacBook had eaten up more 100GB!
dewey•12m ago
Something like https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu with ("brew install ncdu") is great if you are okay with the command line. It's very annoying to drill down in the Finder especially if it's hidden directories.
vachina•45m ago
Because Apple differentiates their products by their storage sizes, they also sell iCloud subscription. There is zero (in fact negative) incentive to respect your storage space.
prmph•39m ago
Yep, it is an awful situation. I'm increasingly becoming frustrated with how Apple keeps disrespecting users.

I downloaded several MacOS installers, not for the MacBook I use, but intending to use them to create a partitioned USB installer (they were for macOS versions that I could clearly not even use for my current MacBook). Then, after creating the USB, since I was short of space, I deleted the installers, including from the trash.

Weirdly, I did not reclaim any space; I wondered why. After scratching my head for a while, I asked an LLM, which directed me to check the system snapshots. I had previously disabled time machine backup and snapshots, and yet I saw these huge system snapshots containing the files I had deleted, and kicker was, there was no way to delete them!

Again I scratched my head for a while for a solution other than wiping the MacBook and re-installing MacOS, and then I had the idea to just restart. Lo and behold, the snapshots were gone after restarting. I was relieved, but also pretty pissed off at Apple.

pdntspa•13m ago
Equally egregious are applications that insist on using the primary disk to cache model data/sample data/whatever
zbentley•3m ago
What should they do instead?

Like, assuming they need the data and it's inconveniently large to fit into RAM, where/how should they store and access it if not the primary disk?

zarzavat•10m ago
The trick is to reboot into recovery partition, disable SIP, then run OmniDiskSweeper as root (as in `sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper`). Then you can find all kinds of caches that are otherwise hidden by SIP.
delaminator•35m ago
My WinSxS folder is 17Gb
AndroTux•24m ago
This one drives me nuts. Not just on Mac, also on iPhone/iPad. It's 2026, and 5G is the killer feature advertised everywhere. There's no reason to default to downloading gigabytes of audio files if they could be streamed with no issue whatsoever.
coldtrait•23m ago
This seems to be a recent popular tool to handle this - https://github.com/tw93/Mole

I also prompt warp/gemini cli to identify unnecessary cache and similar data and delete them

dewey•22m ago
Don't run "du -h ~/Library/Messages" then, I've mentioned that many times before and it's crazy to me to think that Apple is just using up 100GB on my machine, just because I enable iMessage syncing and don't want to delete old conversations.

One would think that's a extremely common use case and it will only grow the more years iMessage exists. Just offload them to the cloud, charge me for it if you want but every other free message service that exists has no problem doing that.

bensyverson•19m ago
Agreed, it should work like the iCloud Photos library; cache locally, but pull from the cloud when necessary.
tbrownaw•1h ago
Sure it uses a few GB just like everything else these days, but some of the comments also mention it being slow?
Aurornis•1h ago
The GitHub issue is AI generated. In my experience triaging these in other projects, you can’t really trust anything in them without verifying. The users will make claims and then the AI will embellish to make them sound more important and accurate.
dylan604•1h ago
> AI will embellish to make them sound more important and accurate.

Did you mean than accurate rather than and accurate? Having a more accurate issue description only sounds like a good thing to me

Filligree•56m ago
To make them sound more accurate.
seanhunter•55m ago
I read that as "make them sound more important and accurate than they actually are".
monsieurbanana•53m ago
Making them look more accurate is not the same as being more accurate, and llms are pretty good at the former.

Imagine a user had a vague idea or something that is broken, then the LLM will choose to interpret his comment for what it thinks is the most likely actual underneath problem, without actually checking anything.

kace91•52m ago
“Seem important and accurate” is correct. It doesn’t imply actual accuracy, the llm will just use figures that resemble an actual calculation, hiding they are wild guesses.

I’ve run into the issue trying to use Claude to instrument and analyze some code for performance. It would make claims like “around 500mb ram are being used in this allocation” without evidence.

Aurornis•1h ago
This GitHub issue itself is clearly AI slop. If you’ve been dealing with GitHub issues in the past months it will be obvious, but it’s confirmed at the end:

> Filed via Claude Code

I assume part of it is true, but determining which part is true is the hard part. I’ve lost a lot of time chasing AI-written bug reports that were actually something else wrong with the user’s computer. I’m assuming the claims of “75% faster” and other numbers are just AI junk, but at least someone could verify if the 10GB VM exists.

chuckadams•1h ago
I wouldn't think it's inappropriate for an AI agent to file an issue against another AI agent, which itself is largely written by AI.
fragmede•1h ago
What's funny is interacting with it in claude code. Claude-desktop-cowork can't do anything about the VM. It creates this 10 GiB VM, but the disk image starts off with something like 6-7 GiB full already, which means any of the cowork stuff you try to do has to fit into the remaining couple of gigs. It's possible to fill it up, and then claude cowork stops working. Because the disk is full. Claude cowork isn't able to fix this problem. It can't even run basic shell commands in the VM, and Opus4.6 is able to tell the user that, but isn't smart enough/empowered to do anything about it.

So contrary to the github issue, my problem is that it's not enough space. So the fix is to navigate to ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/vm_bundles, and then ask Claude Code to upsize the disk to a sparse 60 GiB file, giving cowork much more space to work in while not immediately taking up 60 GiB.

Bigger picture, what this teaches me though, is that my knowledge is still useful in guiding the AI to be able to do things, so I'm not obsolete yet!

pixl97•50m ago
So it's using it's binary disk/image as the cache/work disk also?

Yea, that's a receipt for problems.

quanwinn•1h ago
I imagined someone at Anthropic prompted "improve app performance", and this was the result.
andresquez•55m ago
Way slower, but way better than chat mode. Nothing beats Claude Code CLI imo.
informal007•50m ago
I believe that employees in Anthropocs use CC to develop CC now.

AI really give much user ability to develop a completed product, but the quality is decreasing. Professional developers will be in demand when the products/features become popular.

First batch of users of new products need to take more responsibility to test the product like a rats in lab

ramoz•14m ago
Actually, this I'm not so sure.

https://x.com/backnotprop/status/2028293637373841759

This was tweeted last night as a meme and hit the front page before it was flagged, but I'm actually serious and in favor of slop. VHS over Betamax, honestly, what's best and most convenient for us? We're going to learn this a lot with AI.

game_the0ry•47m ago
Yeah, that's why I do not install these tools on my personal devices anymore and instead play with them on a VPS.

Try this if you have claude code -- ls -a your home dir and see all the garbage claude creates.

atonse•47m ago
I literally spent the last 30 mins with DaisyDisk cleaning up stuff in my laptop, I feel HN is reading my mind :)

I also noticed this 10GB VM from CoWork. And was also surprised at just how much space various things seem to use for no particular reason. There doesn't seem to be any sort of cleanup process in most apps that actually slims down their storage, judging by all the cruft.

Even Xcode. The command line tools installs and keeps around SDKs for a bunch of different OS's, even though I haven't launched Xcode in months. Or it keeps a copy of the iOS simulator even though I haven't launched one in over a year.

hulitu•35m ago
Is there no crond and find on MacOSX ?
cmckn•24m ago
> Xcode…keeps around SDKs for a bunch of different OS's

Not a new problem, unfortunately. DevCleaner is commonly used to keep it under control: https://github.com/vashpan/xcode-dev-cleaner

puppymaster•45m ago
macbook pro m4 bought last year. worked on so many codes and projects. never hot after closing lid. installed electron claude. closed lid and went to sleep and woke up to macbook that has been hot all night. uninstall claude. problem went away.

i kept telling myself this BUT NEVER ELECTRON AGAIN.

hulitu•34m ago
> woke up to macbook that has been hot all night

this is usual reason for divorce /s

DauntingPear7•19m ago
It’s not electron
crumpled•27m ago
The software seems to get into more and more and communicate about what it's doing less and less. That's the crux.

Pondering... Noodling... Some other nonsense...

mixdup•24m ago
All code in Claude™ is written by Claude™
jFriedensreich•23m ago
Its just another example and just a detail in the broader story: We cannot trust any model provider with any tooling or other non model layer on our machines or our servers. No browsers, no cli, no apps no whatever. There may not be alternatives to frontier models yet, but everything else we need to own as true open source trustable layer that works in our interest. This is the battle we can win.
prmph•13m ago
Why don't people form cooperatives, contribute to buy serious hardware and colocate them in local data centers, and run good local models like GLM on them to share?
jug•22m ago
Also apparently eating 2 GB RAM or so to run an entire virtual machine even if you've disabled Cowork. Not sure which of this is worse. Absolute garbage.
kordlessagain•18m ago
The amount of bad things this companies software does is staggering. The models are amazing, the code sucks.
AlexeyBrin•9m ago
Their code is written by their amazing models (this is what they claim anyway).
Terretta•7m ago
Arguably, even without LLM, you too should be dev-ing inside a VM...

https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant is still a thing.

The market for Cowork is normals, getting to tap into a executive assistant who can code. Pros are running their consumer "claws" on a separate Mac Mini. Normals aren't going to do that, and offices aren't going to provision two machines to everyone.

The VM is an obvious answer for this early stage of scaled-up research into collaborative computing.

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