Aren't most these people recommending random tools in the github chat for this entry just attempting to exploit naive users? Why would anyone in this day and age follow advice of new users to download new repos or click at random websites when they already attempt to use claude code or cowork?
Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
71–80 of 201 posts
Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
#72It'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.
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.
> Once that gets filled up, it’s pretty much impossible to understand where the giant block of memory is.
Your friend is called ncdu and can be used as follows:
sudo ncdu -x -e --exclude Volumes /System/Volumes/Data/
Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 enab…
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 [1] https://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/
I use GP, would recommend as well; it generates great color codes tree maps of your storage. Once you get used to navigating it that way, you won’t go back.
Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
#74Yup 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?i…
seatbelt is largely undocumented.
OpenAI Codex CLI was able to use it effectively, so at least AI knows how to use it. Still, its deprecated and not maintained, Apple needs to make something new soon.
Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Offloading to the cloud and charging the user seems like a bigger breach of expectations than the hard drive space.
If you have a choice there's nothing wrong with it. It's the same way that iCloud Photos already work. You can either disable iCloud and have everything locally in your Photos app or let it dynamically offload to iCloud (If you have enough cloud space).
I'd rather pay for cloud space that I'm already using anyway than having it take up my limited space on my laptop that I can't extend.
Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
#76It'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.
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.
My 256gb Mac Mini currently has 65gb of "System Data" and 40gb of "MacOS"
Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
#77It'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.
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.
Gotta hit that docker system prune -a
Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
#78It'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.
> Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB
That's one way to drive sales for higher priced SSDs in Apple products. I'm pretty sure that that sort of move shows up as a real blip on Apple's books.
Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
#79Hi, Felix from Anthropic here. I work on Claude Cowork and Claude Code.
Claude Cowork uses the Claude Code agent harness running inside a Linux VM (with additional sandboxing, network controls, and filesystem mounts). We run that through Apple's virtualization framework or Microsoft's Host Compute System. This buys us three things we like a lot:
(1) A computer for Claude to write software in, because so many user problems can be solved really well by first writing custom-tailored scripts against whatever task you throw at it. We'd like that computer to not be _your_ computer so that Claude is free to configure it in the moment.
(2) Hard guarantees at the boundary: Other sandboxing solutions exist, but for a few reasons, none of them satisfy as much and allow us to make similarly sound guarantees about what Claude will be able to do and not to.
(3) As a product of 1+2, more safety for non-technical users. If you're reading this, you're probably equipped to evaluate whether or not a particular script or command is safe to run - but most humans aren't, and even the ones who are so often experience "approval fatigue". Not having to ask for approval is valuable.
It's a real trade-off though and I'm thankful for any feedback, including this one. We're reading all the comments and have some ideas on how to maybe make this better - for people who don't want to use Cowork at all, who don't want it inside a VM, or who just want a little bit more control. Thank you!
Re: Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
#80It'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.
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.
On 5G, it depends. There are still plenty of people around the world who don't have unlimited data plans.