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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

#101

Post by swyx »

baconner wrote: post #98
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…

FWIW I think many of us would actually very much love to have an official (or semi official) Claude sandboxing container image base / vm base. I wonder if you all have considered making something like the cowork vm available for that?

what would you use it for?

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

#102

Post by ukuina »

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!

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

#103

Post by nhubbard »

pama wrote: post #71

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?

While I generally agree with your sentiment, these tools aren't bad ones:

- Santa is a very common tool used by macOS admins to lock down binary and file access privileges for apps, usually on managed machines

- Disk Inventory X and GrandPerspective are well-known disk space usage tools for macOS (I personally use DaisyDisk but that requires a license)

- WizTree and WinDirStat are very common tools from Windows admin toolkits

The only one here I can say is potentially suspect is ClearDisk. I haven't used it before, but it does appear to be useful for specifically tracking down developer caches that eat up disk space.

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

#104

Post by flatline »

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…

There's a lot that's not being said in (2). That warrants more extensive justification, especially with the issues presented in the parent post.

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by jvidalv »

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.

Suprisingly Claude is amazing at cleaning up your macbook. Tried, works like a charm.

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

#108

Post by jlokier »

AndroTux wrote: post #43
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.

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.

I'm on 5G right now and it just struggled to load the HN front page due to local network congestion. At times of day when it's not congested it reaches 60-90Mbyte/s in the same physical location

Spotify just gave up while trying to show me my podcasts. I can't listen to anything not already downloaded right now.

Yet at 3am I'll be able to download a 100GB LLM without difficulty onto the same device that can't stream a podcast right now.

Unfortunately I don't think 5G is the streaming panacea you have in mind. Maybe one day...

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

#109

Post by mihaelm »

Terretta wrote: post #63

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…

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.

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

#110

Post by bachittle »

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…

Do you think it would be possible in the future to maybe add developer settings to enable or disable certain features, or to switch to other sandboxing methods that are more lightweight like Apple seatbelt for example?
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