Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/29045

104•tonyrice•1h ago

Comments

JanSolo•1h ago

It's becoming self-aware! Quick, lock down the nuclear codes!

Rastonbury•1h ago

it took up 12gb on mine

tom1337•1h ago

I won't understand why Cowork isn't simply opt-in. It also installs a ~10GB vm bundle which you cannot remove

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1rlc71n/claude_de...

xxpor•43m ago

It was on my machine at least, I remember I had to do an additional install to activate that tab...

andix•1h ago

I've stopped using cc a while ago, because it always comes up with new surprises like that.

gopalv•1h ago

The weird thing is that this is probably a performance optimization for quick responses when a user asks a question.

My agent harness spins up a VM too, but it spins up on demand, cools down in 10 minutes and warms up when I focus back on the app.

The files it works on actually lives in a mount.

People take more time to type a prompt than the VM takes to spin up on a fast machine and on a slow machine, the cooldown naturally frees RAM back to the machine.

nathanyz•58m ago

The VM itself is for Claude Cowork which does all work within the VM sandbox. That doesn't help answer why they spin it up immediately and don't have a way to disable it though. Just the "why it exists" question.

sudohackthenews•44m ago

Probably because they vibecoded it

nailer•31m ago

It kind of does though. If you want to use the product they'll need the sandbox ready.

jrochkind1•26m ago

If you're not going to give Claude access to anything on your machine, why are you using Desktop instead of web chat? (Real question, I don't use these much!)

If you are, obviously you need the VM.

plufz•13m ago

It mounts specified directories into the vm from what I remember

amelius•56m ago

Why are the UIs of the AI companies all broken in multiple ways?

jaapz•55m ago

They are dogfooding their products like you wouldnt believe

They are releasing at breakneck pace, it's pretty funny how vibed their products feel sometimes

exe34•54m ago

Dogfood

Traubenfuchs•53m ago

No one left who could fix anything here by hand. Being able to handcraft compelling desktop apps and their plumbing is not a marketable skill anymore.

Mythos, Fable, please do the thing with the VM. Make no mistakes.

exitb•49m ago

Many people will say it’s because of the slop. I think it’s because they have no product vision. The roadmap is pretty much a random walk, which combined with the velocity of agentic coding is like digging a moat with atomic bombs.

OsrsNeedsf2P•47m ago

I find this analogy particularly humorous, as atomic bombs do not make for good excavators

pixl97

cortesoft•55m ago

Isn’t it good that it spins up without no way of stopping it? Why would it be a problem that we do have a way of stopping it?

tom_•48m ago

This question is answered by the post? There is reportedly actually no way of stopping it happen. Perhaps the poster had a brain fart while typing it. Maybe they speak a different dialect of English from you.

echelon_musk•15m ago

There's no dialect of English in which this is correct.

kenjackson•48m ago

I agree. Why is this a problem?

jeppebemad•43m ago

Op is nitpicking on the poorly written title. I came here to find that comment :)

z2•55m ago

This all feels like a race where the model companies try to solve doing work locally in a way that doesn't suck, before the major operating systems companies figure out AI integration into their OS that doesn't suck. It also makes me wonder why Google which has both Gemini and Android can't figure this out, and if there are lessons to draw from that.

ls612•49m ago

The only lesson I'm taking away is that we are still very early in the AI era. AI workflows look entirely different today than they did 18 months ago and I wouldn't bet on them looking the same in 18 months from now.

ddarolfi•49m ago

They are releasing AluminumOS with their Googlebooks, which is a AI forward OS. If its good or not we have yet to see.

elxr•38m ago

It's looking like a slightly updated reskin of chromeOS with gemini features built in.

Definitely not a developer machine based on how they presented it in google IO. So if you write software, it's not looking like it'll be relevant whatsoever. I hope to be proven wrong.

reactordev•34m ago

If everything is in the cloud and you are just prompting agents to code for you, what exactly is “a developer machine”?

elxr•

HypnoticOcelot•53m ago

"without no way" of stopping it?

procone•47m ago

Incredibly insightful. Not everyone speaks English as a first language. On top of that, the title is not ambiguous.

tkcranny•49m ago

I’ve stopped using Claude on the desktop, just because of how slow the app is to start up and interact with. It’s an absolute clunker; I’m mystified why they can’t ship something that works well given their rhetoric about ai.

dbalatero•41m ago

I thought they were all in on agentic coding? They are probably just building at a surface level with only an eye towards shipping, without considering the impact of all the changes. I've seen less and less coordination between engineers as well under that model. If that's the case (Claude Code is this way). it is sort of what you get, no matter the rhetoric about "make sure to review all your changes!" It's always trade offs.

jf•41m ago

I uninstalled it because I have no need for Claude Desktop and there’s no way to keep the 10+ GiB VM image off of my machine

sergiotapia•38m ago

Guaranteed nobody is reading the code being merged in. It's vibes all the way down.

sqquima•34m ago

Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?

seabrookmx•36m ago

I'm with you. I have the Claude web app pinned as a PWA for quick queries, and then use the CLI for everything project-based.

I did consider experimenting with the Routines feature on the desktop app, but I'm leaning towards whipping together something with cron. I saw another poster here who has a daily PR summary routine that I think would be handy, as I have quite a few repos where I'm a sporadic contributor but would like to keep tabs.

paulddraper•42m ago

Please edit the title.

Currently "Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it"

Should be "Claude Desktop spins up a VM with no way of stopping it"

inigyou•30m ago

There are some English dialects with negative concord, meaning that to form the negation of a sentence, you negate all negateable words in it

pier25•28m ago

So a company which has access to practically unlimited tokens and their best models makes crappy software. Huh who would've thought?

literatepeople•28m ago

I didn’t get a screenshot of this, but I just found a really pointed example of Anthropics lack of craft / rush to build. If you open Claude on Windows, and click Dispatch (under cowork) to start that up, it will tell you that you need permissions windows doesn’t have. When you click the buttons for those permissions, it has broken links to macOS system preferences. I really encourage someone to try it and post the images as a reply as I am writing this from my phone.

bryanrasmussen•27m ago

I think the title should be changed. Either with no way of stopping it, or without any way of stopping it.

zkmon•23m ago

Back in the day, personalization / customization was all the rage, as it lets the user feel the control, power and freedom. Now it's the opposite. It's about not letting user to have any control at all. I can't delete some junk apps from my phone and mac, because they are "system" apps. As a non-geek, I can't deal with complexity of the browser and account settings to stop it from what is doing. We are at the mercy of the machines.

stuaxo•21m ago

Classic Anthropic, this comes across as LLM coded nonsense.

boudra•15m ago

i had to uninstall it due to the vm taking around 12G of disk, never touched Cowork. didn't realize they were also launching it

blurbleblurble•14m ago

They must not have used Fable 5 to vibecode that part of Claude Desktop, VMs are strictly forbidden high stakes cybersecurity work.

jacobgold•13m ago

I have two friends that are using coding agents on Windows, which was surprising to learn.

I would have assumed almost everyone would get a Mac/Linux computer to use coding agents because Unix is their "native" platform. It's Bash tool calls all the way down.

Does anyone know a source for reliable data on what coding agent apps devs are using? How many are using Code Claude CLI vs Claude Desktop, etc?

myk9001•11m ago

How come Claude Code still hasn't triaged and fixed this? Feed it the bug link, someone.

valeriozen•8m ago

the vm makes sense for cowork but no off switch is weird. a visible sandbox on/off toggle would do more for trust than any safety blogpost imo

Grombobulous•5m ago

As long as the VM closes when the application closes, I don’t see too much of an issue with this design decision.

It seems like the VM is a core part of how you use the application.

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