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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

#181

Post by sponnath »

rvz wrote: post #88
informal007 wrote: post #23

I believe that employees in Anthropocs use CC to develop CC now. AI really give much user ability to develop a completed product, but the quality is decreasing. Professional developers will be in demand when the products/features become popular. First batch of users of new products need to take more responsibility to test the product like a rats in lab

> AI really give much user ability to develop a completed product, but the quality is decreasing. Professional developers will be in demand when the products/features become popular. Looking at the amount of issues, outages and rookie mistakes the employees are making leads me to believe that most of them are below junior level. If anyone were to re-interview everyone at Anthropic for their own roles with their own i…

While the whole "Claude Code is just like a game engine" tweet was silly, this comment seems too derisive. I highly doubt engineers at Anthropic are lacking in talent.

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

#182

Post by jasomill »

prmph wrote: post #168
zarzavat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to reboot into recovery partition, disable SIP, then run OmniDiskSweeper as root (as in `sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper`). Then you can find all kinds of caches that are otherwise hidden by SIP.

It shouldn't be this hard to clear unwanted data from my own computer

My immediate reaction to this is that the OS has a hard time establishing intent, and in some cases it probably should be this hard to delete data that's required for the system to boot on the grounds that you'd probably want it if you understood what it was, and ideally also hard for malware to delete data it doesn't want on your computer (forensically useful logs, backup copies of files encrypted by ransomware, etc.).

But none of this applies to caches and temporary files, which could be reasonably managed for 99% of users by adding a "clear all caches" checkbox in the reboot dialog with a warning that doing this is likely to slow down the system and increase battery usage for the next few hours, or to system-managed snapshots that mostly just need better UI and documentation.

UI transparency is my only real complaint. A reasonable amount of data the system wants to make difficult to delete is fine, so long as it clearly explains what it is and why. "System Data" is only acceptable as a description for the root of what should be a well-documented hierarchy.

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

#183

Post by [deleted] »

rvz wrote: post #152
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…

> (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. This is the most interesting requirement. So all the sandbox solutions that were recently developed all over GitHub, fell short of your expectations? This is half surprising since many people were u…

[deleted]

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

#184

Post by PrairieFire »

thomascountz wrote: post #158
lxgr wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've come across two different answers regarding Apple's Virtualization.Framework support for nested virtualization: 1. Yes, but only Linux guests 2. Yes, but only M3+ https://github.com/apple/container/issues/191

You are correct on both accounts, as of tahoe 26.3 you can't nest a macOS guest under a macOS guest. However you can nest 2 layers deep with any combo of layer 1 guest so long as the machine is running Sequoia and is M3/M4/M5.

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

#185

Post by baconner »

hedgehog wrote: post #138
baconner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok I'd seen some sample sandbox scripts for this from anthropic before but not a full reference container. nice, thank you for sharing.

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

#186

Post by baconner »

swyx wrote: post #101
baconner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What the other poster here said for testing against a reference, but also as an easier to get started with base for my own coding sandbox with coding agents. Took me quite a while to build one on my own that I was semi-happy with but I'd imagine one solid enough to run cowork on safely might have some deeper thinking and review behind it.

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

#187

Post by throwaway613746 »

brunooliv wrote: post #86

I really love Anthropic's models, but, every single product/feature I've used other than the Claude Code CLI has been terrible... The CLI just "sticked" for me and I've never needed (or arguably looked in depth) any other features. This for my professional dayjob. For personal use, where I have a Pro subscription and adventure into exploring all the other features/products they have... I mean, the experience outside…

[dead]

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

#188

Post by AndroTux »

frereubu wrote: post #80
AndroTux wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then they can enable downloads in the settings. I’m not saying they should remove the feature. I’m saying setting this as a default on a non-budget device is a bad design choice.

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

consumer451 wrote: post #153
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…

Any chance you guys could get the Claude Desktop installer fixed on Windows? It currently requires users to turn on "developer mode." Sorry for the ask here, but unaware of other avenues of support as the tickets on the Claude Code repo keep getting closed, as it is not a CC issue. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/26457https:...

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by nuker »

zarzavat wrote: post #61
torben-friis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trick is to reboot into recovery partition, disable SIP, then run OmniDiskSweeper as root (as in `sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper`). Then you can find all kinds of caches that are otherwise hidden by SIP.

Hmm, Full Disk Access perm is not enough?
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