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

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

#141

Post by woadwarrior01 »

DauntingPear7 wrote: post #51
puppymaster wrote: post #30

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.

It’s not electron

The macOS Claude app is absolutely an electron app, which is what the github issue in this post is about.

If you'd like to verify for yourself: On your mac, right click on the Claude app icon and click on "Show Package Contents" and then navigate to Contents > Frameworks > Electron Framework.framework.

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

#142

Post by mh- »

dawnerd wrote: post #70
dewey wrote: post #49

Earlier 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…

Same with photos. You can enable the option to offload but there’s no way to control how much is used locally. I don’t know why messages does that either. Also no easy way to remove the hundreds of thousands of photos in messages across all chats.

And for people like me who are content to pay for the iCloud storage in order to not delete them - there's no way to say "keep everything. but not locally, because that's silly."

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

#143

Post by mh- »

bensyverson wrote: post #52
dewey wrote: post #49

Earlier 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…

Agreed, it should work like the iCloud Photos library; cache locally, but pull from the cloud when necessary.

Even with the way Photos work - which is desirable, I agree - I should be able to specify a limit on how much local disk it uses.

I don't know what the formula it uses is, but it's insufficient.

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

#144

Post by wutwutwat »

beej71 wrote: post #89
felixrieseberg wrote: post #79

Hi, 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 pro…

I think these are are excellent points, but the complaint talks about significant performance and power issues.

That's every virtual machine that's ever existed. They are slower than metal and you're running two OS stacks so you'll draw more power.

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

#146

Post by lxgr »

radicality wrote: post #113
felixrieseberg wrote: post #79

Hi, 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 pro…

I tried to use it right after launch from within Claude Desktop, on a Mac VM running within UTM, and got cryptoc messages about Apple virtualization framework. That made me realize it wants to also run a Apple virtualization VM but can’t since it’s inside one already - imo the error messaging here could be better, or considering that it already is in a VM, it could perhaps bypass the vm altogether. Because right now…

Does UTM/Apple's framework not allow nested virtualization? If I remember correctly from x86(_64) times, this is a thing that sometimes needs to be manually enabled.

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

#147

Post by lxgr »

ukuina wrote: post #102
felixrieseberg wrote: post #79

Hi, 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 pro…

Can you allow placing the VM on an external disk? Also, please allow Cowork to work on directories outside the homedir!

I suppose you could just symlink the directory it's in?

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

#148

Post by mihaelm »

Terretta wrote: post #136
mihaelm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer devcontainers for more involved project setups as they keep it lighter than introducing a VM. It’s also pretty easy to work with Docker (on your host) with the docker-outside-of-docker feature. However, I’m also curious about using NixOS for dev environments. I think there’s untapped potential there.

we love nix for dev environments, and highly recommend it. many other problems go away. don't see that as what's being solved here, though. containers contain stuff the way an open bookcase contains books, they're just namespaces and cgroups on a file system overlay, more or less, held together by willpower not boundaries: https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/10/10/what-even-is-a-container/ https://github.com/p8952/bocker as a…

I just went on a tangent related to dev environments i.e. inside what to develop. In case of Cowork, a VM is definitely the right choice - no doubt.

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

#149

Post by jjfoooo4 »

lxgr wrote: post #85
cogman10 wrote: post #83

Ok, so a lot of this boils down to the fact that this sort of software really wants to be running on linux. For both windows and mac, the only way to (really) do that is creating a VM. It seems to me that the main issue here is painful disconnects between the VM and the host system. The kernel in the VM wants to manage memory and disk usage and that management ultimately means the host needs to grant the guest OS lar…

Given that Claude Code runs without issues on macOS, I'd guess that it's more about sandboxing shell sessions (i.e. not macOS applications or single processes, for which solutions exist). Unfortunately, unlike Linux, macOS doesn't have a great out-of-the-box story there; even Apple's first-party OCI runtime is based on per-container Linux VMs.

The upgrade to the native installer gave me some issues, I had Claude fail to return any responses and continuously eat memory until my computer crashed! The only fix I could figure out is nuking my entire .claude dir, losing all my history etc with it

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

#150

Post by [deleted] »

MarleTangible wrote: post #4

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.

[deleted]
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