Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 201 posts

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

#131

Post by hirvi74 »

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 concur. I don't want to install libraries on my host machine that I won't use for anything other than development, e.g., Node.js.

On macOS, Lima has been a godsend. I have Claude Code in an image, and I just mount the directory I want the VM to have access to. It works flawlessly and has been a replacement for Vagrant for me for some time. Though, I owe a lot to Vagrant. It was a lifesaver for me back in the day.

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

#132

Post by pncnmnp »

On a similar tangent, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, check out this month-old discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772003

ChatGPT's code execution container contains 56 vCPUs!! Back then, simonw mentioned:

> It appears to have 4GB of RAM and 56 (!?) CPU cores https://chatgpt.com/share/6977e1f8-0f94-8006-9973-e9fab6d244...

I'm seeing something similar on a free account too: https://chatgpt.com/share/69a5bbc8-7110-8005-8622-682d5943dc...

On my paid account, I was able to verify this. I was also able to get a CPU-bound workload running on all cores. Interestingly, it was not able to fully saturate them, though - despite trying for 20-odd minutes. I asked it to test with stress-ng, but it looks like it had no outbound connectivity to install the tool: https://chatgpt.com/share/69a5c698-28bc-8005-96b6-9c089b0cc5...

Anyways, that's a lot of compute. Not quite sure why its necessary for a plus account. Would love to get some thoughts on this?

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

#133

Post by cogman10 »

kccqzy wrote: post #119
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…

It’s a solved problem in the VM world too. Memory ballooning is a technique where a driver inside the VM kernel cooperates with the hypervisor to return memory back to the host by appearing to consume the memory from the VM. And disk access is even easier; just present a network filesystem to the VM.

The network file system to host is usually pretty slow no? That was my impression.

As for memory ballooning, the main issue with it is that it (generally) only gets triggered when the host runs out of memory.

For a host which is only running VMs, this is fine. But for the typical consumer host it becomes cumbersome as you still need to give the VM a giant memory block and hope that your VM of choice is good enough to free on time. It's also uncoordinated. When swapping needs to happen, if the VM was using the host for allocation the host could much more efficiently decide what needs to go into swap.

And if the host was in charge of both the memory and file system, then things like a system cache could be done more efficiently on top of all that.

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

#134

Post by anonymars »

threetonesun wrote: post #97
vachina wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Been a while since I needed to use it there but it always amazed me that the Windows implementation of iCloud was more flexible in terms of location and ability to decide what files got synced.

Ho ho, except for where it puts the photos. Those go into a subfolder of the system photos folder, and there's no configuration (yet you can configure the "shared photos" location)

And then, should you try to set up OneDrive (despite Microsoft's shenanigans, it does simplify taking care of non-tech-savvy relatives), it will refuse to sync the photos folder because 'it contains another cloud storage' and you'll genuinely wonder how or why anyone uses computers anymore

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

#135

Post by parliament32 »

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?

This? https://code.claude.com/docs/en/devcontainer

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

#136

Post by Terretta »

mihaelm wrote: post #109
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.

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 firm required to care about infosec, we appreciate the stance in their (2). and MacOS VMs are so fast now, they might as well be containers except, you know, they work. (if not fast, that should be fixed.)

that said, yes, running local minikube and the like remain incredibly useful for mocking container envs where the whole environment is inside a machine(s) boundary. containers are _almost_ as awesome as bookcases…

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

#137

Post by ctmnt »

bachittle wrote: post #2

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?i…

I don’t have an opinion on how they should handle the nested VMs probably, but I very much disagree that Seatbelt is better. Claude Code (aka `claude`) uses it, and it’s barely good for anything.

Out of curiosity, why are you running Cowork inside a VM in the first place? What does that get you that letting Cowork use its own VM wouldn’t?

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

#138

Post by hedgehog »

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?

There is this:

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/devcontainer

It does work but I found pretty quickly that I wanted to base my robot sandbox on an image tailored for the project and not the other way around.

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

#139

Post by epistasis »

dewey wrote: post #49
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.

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…

    sudo du -sh ~/Library/Messages
    Password:
    du: /Users/cvaske/Library/Messages: Operation not permitted
Wow, SIP is a bit more insidious than I remember. Maybe I should try it in Terminal.app rather than a third party app... I wonder if there will ever be a way to tell the OS "this action really was initiated by the user, not malware, let them try to do what they say they want to do"

Edit: investigating a bit more, apparently the lack of a sudo-equivalent, an "elevate this one process temporarily" command is intentional in the design, so that malicious scripts can't take advantage of that "this is really the user" approval path. I can't say I agree with that design decision, but at least it's an ethos.

Post reply on HN