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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

#81

Post by mrbombastic »

dewey wrote: post #59
dotxlem wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same problem and had some luck cleaning things up by enabling "calculate all sizes" in Finder, which will show you the total directory size, and makes it a bit easier to look for where the big stuff is hiding. You'll also want to make sure to look through hidden directories like ~/Library; I found a bunch of Docker-related stuff in there which turned out to be where a lot of my disk space went. You can enab…

Something like https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu with ("brew install ncdu") is great if you are okay with the command line. It's very annoying to drill down in the Finder especially if it's hidden directories.

in a similar vein if you are looking for a nice GUI, daisydisk is great: https://daisydiskapp.com one time $10 payment

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

#82

Post by xvector »

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…

Cowork has been an insane productivity boost, it is actually amazing. Thank you!

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

#83

Post by cogman10 »

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 large blocks of disk and memory.

Is anyone thinking about or working on narrowing that requirement? Like, I may want the 99% of what a VM does, but I really want my host system to ultimately manage both memory and disk. I'd love it if in the linux VM I had a bridge for file IO which interacted directly with the host file system and a bridge in the memory management system which ultimately called the host system's memory allocation API directly and disabled the kernels memory management system.

containers and cgroups are basically how linux does this. But that's a pretty big surface area that I doubt any non-linux system could adopt.

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

#84

Post by zhyder »

I guess it could warn about it but the VM sandbox is the best part of Cowork. The sandbox itself is necessary to balance the power you get with generating code (that's hidden-to-user) with the security you need for non-technical users. I'd go even further and make user grant host filesystem access only to specific folders, and warn about anything with write access: can think of lots of easy-to-use UIs for this.

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

#85

Post by lxgr »

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.

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

#86

Post by brunooliv »

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 of Claude Code and the terminal has been... bad.

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

#87

Post by mock-possum »

zbentley wrote: post #64
pdntspa wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equally egregious are applications that insist on using the primary disk to cache model data/sample data/whatever

What should they do instead? Like, assuming they need the data and it's inconveniently large to fit into RAM, where/how should they store and access it if not the primary disk?

They should ask. Let users specify a scratch / cache location - preferably fast storage that’s not The OS drive

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

#88

Post by rvz »

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 interview questions, I would guess that >75% of them would not pass their own interviews.

The only team the would pass them are the Bun team and some other of the recently acquired startups.

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

#89

Post by beej71 »

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.

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

#90

Post by yuppiepuppie »

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…

I tend to agree here. Today, I tried to get the claude chat to give me a list of Jira tickets from one board (link provided) and then upload it to notion with some additional context. It glitched out after trying the prompt over again 4x. I eventually gave up and went back to the terminal.
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