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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

#171

Post by aberoham »

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…

Claude Cowork grabs local DNS resolution on macOS which conflicts with secure web gateway aka ZTNA aka SASE products such as Cloudflare Warp which do similar. The work-around is to close Cowork, let Warp grab mDNSResponder's attention first, then restart Claude Desktop, or some similar special ordering sequence. It's annoying, but you could say that about everything having to do with MITM middleboxes.

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

#173

Post by blcknight »

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 would look at how podman for Mac manages this; it is more transparent about what's happening and why it needs a VM. It also lets you control more about how the VM is executed.

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

#175

Post by divan »

quinncom wrote: post #128
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 accidentally clicked the Claude Cowork button inside the Claude desktop app. I never used it. I didn't notice anything at the time, but a week later I discovered the huge VM file on my disk. It would be really nice to ask the user, “Are you sure you want to use Cowork, it will download and install a huge VM on your disk.”

Same. I work on M3 Pro with 512GB disk, and most of the time I have aroung 50GB free that goes down to 1GB often quite quick (I work with video editing and photos and caches are agressive there). I use apps like Pretty Clean and some own scripts (for brew clean, deleting Flutter builds, etc). So every 10GB used is a big deal for me.

Also discovered that VM image eating 10GB for no reason. I have Claude Desktop installed, but almost never use it (mostly Claude Code).

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

#176

Post by quinncom »

ephou7 wrote: post #164
quinncom wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accidentally clicked the Claude Cowork button inside the Claude desktop app. I never used it. I didn't notice anything at the time, but a week later I discovered the huge VM file on my disk. It would be really nice to ask the user, “Are you sure you want to use Cowork, it will download and install a huge VM on your disk.”

Jesus Christ what kind of potatos are you using when 10 GB of disk space are even noticable for you?

If I had been tethering to mobile hotspot at the time it would have instantly used 500 pesos of data. That’s 3x my monthly electric bill.

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

#178

Post by bobmcnamara »

wutwutwat wrote: post #144
beej71 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hot forking would be a killer app here - far faster to clone a VM, screw it up, burn it down, and repeat than anything else

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

#179

Post by 10000truths »

cogman10 wrote: post #133
kccqzy wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

NFS doesn't have to be slow. If you avoid traversing the TCP/IP stack, performance is fine. Linux guests can use vsock to communicate with the hypervisor directly, and macOS hosts can use the Virtualization framework to map a guest vsock to a host UNIX socket.

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

#180

Post by sherburt3 »

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…

Do you wear a condom while you’re programming too for maximum protection?
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