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Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use
- insumanth 4mo ago[dead]
- JanSolo 4mo agoIt's becoming self-aware! Quick, lock down the nuclear codes!
- Rastonbury 4mo agoit took up 12gb on mine
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- tom1337 4mo agoI won't understand why Cowork isn't simply opt-in. It also installs a ~10GB vm bundle which you cannot remove https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1rlc71n/claude_desktop_app_silently_downloads_a_13_gb https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1rlc71n/claude_de...
- xxpor 4mo agoIt was on my machine at least, I remember I had to do an additional install to activate that tab...
- steve_adams_86 4mo agoRule 1 with making number go up is you eliminate friction at all costs. The user's hard drive is free to you, so there's no reason to gate a feature you want them to use based on that. 98% of them will have no idea you're foisting garbage on them.
- xp84 4mo agoRIP, every base model mac from the past 10 years with the <= 256GB SSD. Including the new Neo. When you consider how much of that is eaten up by the system, swap space, caches, reserved space to download OS updates, and apps (2GB a piece is far from uncommon) -- having less than 15GB free is completely unsurprising on that size disk.
- Scoundreller 4mo agoI miss the SD slot on my old MacBook Air. Even better when they came out with low profile adapters that held microSD cards basically flush. At least you can buy usb-c nubs fairly cheaply these days.
- ninjamar 4mo agoI've found that the easiest way to 'remove' the bundle is to delete its contents, then change the permission on the folder, so Claude can't write to it.
- andix 4mo agoI've stopped using cc a while ago, because it always comes up with new surprises like that.
- helezon77 4mo ago[flagged]
- redsocksfan45 4mo ago[dead]
- gopalv 4mo agoThe weird thing is that this is probably a performance optimization for quick responses when a user asks a question. My agent harness spins up a VM too, but it spins up on demand, cools down in 10 minutes and warms up when I focus back on the app. The files it works on actually lives in a mount. People take more time to type a prompt than the VM takes to spin up on a fast machine and on a slow machine, the cooldown naturally frees RAM back to the machine.
- nathanyz 4mo agoThe VM itself is for Claude Cowork which does all work within the VM sandbox. That doesn't help answer why they spin it up immediately and don't have a way to disable it though. Just the "why it exists" question.
- sudohackthenews 4mo agoProbably because they vibecoded it
- rvz 4mo agoCorrect and they have no idea what they are doing.
- danudey 4mo agoI mean, that's kind of a stretch given how popular and well-regarded Claude Code is at this point. They're not perfect but they seem to be the best out there at this point.
- rvz 4mo ago> I mean, that's kind of a stretch given how popular and well-regarded Claude Code is at this point. Popularity here is irrelevant. Just because the software is "popular", it does not always mean that the quality of the engineering and their choices is the best. Objectively, it's the model that everyone regards as the best rather than their desktop apps or the harness that drives it. That is why people want to use the model and their subscription in other harnesses. In this case, the desktop app is evidently poor with very embarrassing bugs and glitches like this and I expect well funded startups with the best engineers releasing very high quality code. Obviously, this is not the case at Anthropic.
- theappsecguy 4mo agoIt's popular because they have the best models and they are burning obscene amounts of money handing out tokens via subscriptions (for now) at a huge discount compared to what the API costs are. Claude Code itself is incredibly buggy and as we have seen the codebase is a complete mess of slop.
- amelius 4mo agoWhy are the UIs of the AI companies all broken in multiple ways?
- jaapz 4mo agoThey are dogfooding their products like you wouldnt believe They are releasing at breakneck pace, it's pretty funny how vibed their products feel sometimes
- exe34 4mo agoDogfood
- Traubenfuchs 4mo agoNo one left who could fix anything here by hand. Being able to handcraft compelling desktop apps and their plumbing is not a marketable skill anymore. Mythos, Fable, please do the thing with the VM. Make no mistakes.
- exitb 4mo agoMany people will say it’s because of the slop. I think it’s because they have no product vision. The roadmap is pretty much a random walk, which combined with the velocity of agentic coding is like digging a moat with atomic bombs.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 4mo agoI find this analogy particularly humorous, as atomic bombs do not make for good excavators
- cortesoft 4mo agoIsn’t it good that it spins up without no way of stopping it? Why would it be a problem that we do have a way of stopping it?
- tom_ 4mo agoThis question is answered by the post? There is reportedly actually no way of stopping it happen. Perhaps the poster had a brain fart while typing it. Maybe they speak a different dialect of English from you.
- echelon_musk 4mo agoThere's no dialect of English in which this is correct.
- tom_ 4mo agoThat could be true, but I don't think I'd bet on it myself.
- antonvs 4mo agoGood call. The original comment is making fun of the incorrect double negative. “Without no way” means there is a way.
- tom_ 4mo agoMany kinds of double negative are acceptable in many English dialects, and are interpreted as emphasis. The negatives add, rather than multiply. (Though I admit I myself don't speak such a dialect, hence the equivocation.)
- antonvs 4mo agoThis particular instance is not valid in normal English.
- z2 4mo agoThis all feels like a race where the model companies try to solve doing work locally in a way that doesn't suck, before the major operating systems companies figure out AI integration into their OS that doesn't suck. It also makes me wonder why Google which has both Gemini and Android can't figure this out, and if there are lessons to draw from that.
- ls612 4mo agoThe only lesson I'm taking away is that we are still very early in the AI era. AI workflows look entirely different today than they did 18 months ago and I wouldn't bet on them looking the same in 18 months from now.
- ddarolfi 4mo agoThey are releasing AluminumOS with their Googlebooks, which is a AI forward OS. If its good or not we have yet to see.
- elxr 4mo agoIt's looking like a slightly updated reskin of chromeOS with gemini features built in. Definitely not a developer machine based on how they presented it in google IO. So if you write software, it's not looking like it'll be relevant whatsoever. I hope to be proven wrong.
- reactordev 4mo agoIf everything is in the cloud and you are just prompting agents to code for you, what exactly is “a developer machine”?
- elxr 4mo agoI'm obviously not just prompting agents for everything. What are you on about? Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?
- HypnoticOcelot 4mo ago"without no way" of stopping it?
- procone 4mo agoIncredibly insightful. Not everyone speaks English as a first language. On top of that, the title is not ambiguous.
- tonyrice 4mo agolol :D fair enough
- HypnoticOcelot 4mo agoSorry if that came across as snarky!
- tkcranny 4mo agoI’ve stopped using Claude on the desktop, just because of how slow the app is to start up and interact with. It’s an absolute clunker; I’m mystified why they can’t ship something that works well given their rhetoric about ai.
- dbalatero 4mo agoI thought they were all in on agentic coding? They are probably just building at a surface level with only an eye towards shipping, without considering the impact of all the changes. I've seen less and less coordination between engineers as well under that model. If that's the case (Claude Code is this way). it is sort of what you get, no matter the rhetoric about "make sure to review all your changes!" It's always trade offs.
- jf 4mo agoI uninstalled it because I have no need for Claude Desktop and there’s no way to keep the 10+ GiB VM image off of my machine
- sergiotapia 4mo agoGuaranteed nobody is reading the code being merged in. It's vibes all the way down.
- sqquima 4mo agoAre you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?
- seabrookmx 4mo agoI'm with you. I have the Claude web app pinned as a PWA for quick queries, and then use the CLI for everything project-based. I did consider experimenting with the Routines feature on the desktop app, but I'm leaning towards whipping together something with cron. I saw another poster here who has a daily PR summary routine that I think would be handy, as I have quite a few repos where I'm a sporadic contributor but would like to keep tabs.
- inigyou 4mo ago
- paulddraper 4mo agoPlease edit the title. Currently "Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it" Should be "Claude Desktop spins up a VM with no way of stopping it"
- pier25 4mo agoSo a company which has access to practically unlimited tokens and their best models makes crappy software. Huh who would've thought? /s
- literatepeople 4mo agoI didn’t get a screenshot of this, but I just found a really pointed example of Anthropics lack of craft / rush to build. If you open Claude on Windows, and click Dispatch (under cowork) to start that up, it will tell you that you need permissions windows doesn’t have. When you click the buttons for those permissions, it has broken links to macOS system preferences. I really encourage someone to try it and post the images as a reply as I am writing this from my phone.
- maweaver 4mo agoI don't know where's a good place to post a screenshot, but can confirm I get a dialog saying: > Get an app to open this 'x-apple.systempreferences' link > Your PC doesn't have an app that can open this link. Try looking for a compatible app in the Microsoft Store.
- angry_octet 4mo agoThis is just a standard artefact of it being generated by Opus. A human needs to detect this problem and get it to handle the cross platform case.
- literatepeople 4mo agoThe issue here isnt that an AI wrote the code, its that a human didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. LLM's allow you to rush designs out the door with unprecedented speed.
- noname120 4mo agoClaude is entirely vibecoded and it shows
- bryanrasmussen 4mo agoI think the title should be changed. Either with no way of stopping it, or without any way of stopping it.
- busymom0 4mo ago[dead]
- zkmon 4mo agoBack in the day, personalization / customization was all the rage, as it lets the user feel the control, power and freedom. Now it's the opposite. It's about not letting user to have any control at all. I can't delete some junk apps from my phone and mac, because they are "system" apps. As a non-geek, I can't deal with complexity of the browser and account settings to stop it from what is doing. We are at the mercy of the machines.
- xp84 4mo agoIt hurts to have all this control stripped away. Once upon a time, you bought iLife (suite of iPhoto, iMovie, etc) on a CD or DVD and installed it. Today, you physically cannot delete the Photos app no matter what. On my work computer, where I never manage any photos, have no iCloud account and never will, I have to keep this app installed and anytime I so much as AirDrop a png to my computer I am prompted to "Add to Photos" with it. No thank you. The .app is actually only 41MB, so obviously they've moved the majority of it to some mystery-meat libraries or frameworks installed elsewhere anyway.
- cush 4mo agoThese apps are built for normies, not coders
- sharpshift 4mo ago[dead]
- ozgrakkurt 4mo agoHighly recommend trying a linux computer with kde. I have been having similar annoyances with my macbook and switching to kde felt really good. Even though the hardware of the linux pc isn’t nearly as good.
- tencentshill 4mo agoLinux is great, it wont do anything you don't specify. The issue is it wont do anything you don't specify.
- stuaxo 4mo agoClassic Anthropic, this comes across as LLM coded nonsense.
- boudra 4mo agoi had to uninstall it due to the vm taking around 12G of disk, never touched Cowork. didn't realize they were also launching it
- blurbleblurble 4mo agoThey must not have used Fable 5 to vibecode that part of Claude Desktop, VMs are strictly forbidden high stakes cybersecurity work.
- jacobgold 4mo agoI have two friends that are using coding agents on Windows, which was surprising to learn. Edit: yes, with WSL2 I believe in both cases. I would have assumed almost everyone would get a Mac/Linux computer to use coding agents because Unix is their "native" platform. It's Bash tool calls all the way down. Does anyone know a source for reliable data on what coding agent apps devs are using? How many are using Code Claude CLI vs Claude Desktop, etc?
- dboreham 4mo agoAre you sure they're not using WSL2 (which is Linux, not Windows)?
- jacobgold 4mo agoYes, sure, they're using Linux within a virtual machine (WSL2).
- mock-possum 4mo agoI mean I’m using coding agents on windows, because I’m not just going to learn a whole new operating system just to make robots write code for me. I want tools that meet me where I’m at, not tools that demand I change up my entire UX to interact with them. The assumption is not “what’s wrong with Windows that it doesn’t work with <technology>,” more “what’s wrong with <technology> that it doesn’t work with Windows” Why wouldn’t you want your thing to be cross platform
- asveikau 4mo agoWsl2.0 is literally a Linux vm built into windows. I imagine some people are using that.
- myk9001 4mo agoHow come Claude Code still hasn't triaged and fixed this? Feed it the bug link, someone.
- valeriozen 4mo agothe vm makes sense for cowork but no off switch is weird. a visible sandbox on/off toggle would do more for trust than any safety blogpost imo
- Grombobulous 4mo agoAs long as the VM closes when the application closes, I don’t see too much of an issue with this design decision. It seems like the VM is a core part of how you use the application.
- doublerabbit 4mo agoApart from you have no idea what's going on in the VM. It's not as it has a virtual terminal. I'll play the skeptic archetype: What's not to say they're transmitting all prompts back HQ? Don't be naive and don't think they don't already do this. Why not ask itself and see what it says about it. "Claude, why are you running in a virtual machine and what are you doing?". /shrug
- Grombobulous 4mo agoClaude transmits all prompts back to HQ as a part of its basic functionality. If you are using an AI system to read your codebase from your local folder and make changes, whether or not you have a VM running or not is inconsequential. The Claude extension and/or CLI doesn’t need a VM to send code back to the mothership, you’re already running an executable program and granting it directory access. Whether you trust a company as a vendor is typically based on their privacy policy, EULA, and your contract with them (if applicable). Those are the bits that have legal enforceability.
- litmus-pit-git 4mo ago[dead]
- behole 4mo ago13 GIGS! Between that and the absorbent space MACOS sucks up, it's challenging.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoand on my Mac any time I accidentally click Cowork which I don't use whatsoever, it re-makes the same VM, without asking me. It's one of the dumbest things ever. You're about to hijack nearly 20GB of my storage (which gets eaten up as it is) and you don't think to ask me if I even want the VM before you shove one into my system?
- quacky_batak 4mo agoI also discovered this while noticing my Mac was low on storage, I only clicked on cowork once and after deleting it from the folder i’m scared to open the cowork tab coz ik it’ll just fill up the space
- WalterBright 4mo ago> without no way Not no way not no how!
- rvz 4mo agoWhen was the last time Claude's C Compiler was updated? 4 months ago? [0] It is written in Rust™, surely it is better than the rest of them. [0] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- trilogic 4mo agoVibecoded with AGI, production ready.
- calin2k 4mo agowith no way or without no way?
- hebetude 4mo agolol, why even use Claude desktop? I want Claude code to stop eating up 10s of gb of virtual memory
- taf2 4mo agokill -9
- shevy-java 4mo agoPeople trust skynet. People are very foolish. The younger generation needs to watch the Terminator franchise - it is all explained there.
- gastonmorixe 4mo agoSafari > Add to Dock > done
- tartakovsky 4mo agoIs Claude self-replicating in an attempt for world domination?
- dbmikus 4mo agoUnderstand that it is annoying to spin up a heavyweight VM whenever running Claude Desktop, but I actually think per-app + agent virtualization is the future. Next version of an app is: 1. micro VM 2. agent on the VM 3. software bundled into the VM Then the agent is totally sandboxed at the hardware virtualization level. It can use the software tools on the VM or write its own. VM can control which software is "frozen" and which is open to agent modification. And VM can also control which services are exposed outside the VM through sockets, HTTP server, X window system, whatever It's self-modifying apps that are sealed off from touching parts of the computer they shouldn't.
- sudosteph 4mo agoYep, I've been using a local vm-centric agent setup for about 3 months, and it works great. I think there is also value in the fact that with a local VM, you can have the same public IP address, so you're not relying on an EC2 EIP that may be blacklisted somewhere.
- dbmikus 4mo agoYes, running locally certainly helps if you want your sandboxed AI to be able to use the internet without getting blackholed by Cloudflare
- danudey 4mo agoNot sure if this is deliberate or not but you're describing Docker Sandbox extremely closely. https://www.docker.com/products/docker-sandboxes/ https://www.docker.com/products/docker-sandboxes/
- dbmikus 4mo agoYeah, Docker Sandbox is in the right direction. But there's a lot of parts that are still not ironed out yet. How do you package a Docker Sandbox up into an app that can expose UI widgets, with an agent hiding behind them? What widgets is the agent allowed to modify? How do you run a workflow like "give agent all these files, modify the files, and do changeset management on the modifications?" I'm not 100% sure which part of these will be baked into the application standard format, and which are orthogonal. But current way of packaging up and running these agents doesn't feel right. I think about this a lot because my startup is building cloud VMs for agents to do code-gen and auto-validate changes, so we have a workflow like: 1. git repo, skills, CLI tools, biz context goes in 2. agent iterates against running dev environment 3. changes go out into git PRs and CI I think this type of app/agent workflow will expand outside coding use-cases.
- deskamess 4mo agoI had my admin disable cowork a month ago and that worked. Has it resumed since then?
- torginus 4mo agoIs it just me, but this feels like Claude gets to have a nigh-impenetrable black box right on your machine and you have no idea what is going on inside it. After all, the last time I encountered Hyper-V it was in the context of copy protection that prevented crackers from observing or interfering with video game protection
- aplomb1026 4mo ago[flagged]
- Uptrenda 4mo agoAnd if they didn't users would instead be whining that it ran rm -rf on their root directory. Sometimes it seems like the people here just want to act like insufferable neckbeards for no good reason.
- electroly 4mo agoI run Claude Desktop inside a Hyper-V VM. My VM doesn't have the "Virtual Machine Platform" feature installed at all. The app accepts this and simply disables the Cowork tab. I wonder if there's some other way to block the creation of the VM to force Claude Desktop onto this code path without having to uninstall Hyper-V. That said, Claude (both Desktop and CLI) ships on Windows without any sandboxing support for Code. They only have sandboxing for Linux and macOS. If you need to run it on Windows, I really recommend running it in an isolated VM, which then allows you to omit the "Virtual Machine Platform" feature in the VM and solves this issue. The "Windows Sandbox" OS feature provides such a VM without needing another Windows license.
- angry_octet 4mo agoThe VM causes observability problems, which corporate platform stakeholders are sensitive to. They will eventually figure out a way to provide an ESR/logging interface to the sandboxed code that is distinct from the user level telemetry, then Defender/Crowdstrike etc will just support that.
- tormeh 4mo agoThat sounds like a lot, but your music player probably costs that much in RAM anyway. Seriously, with the current RAM prices we as an industry have to figure out a way to use less of it. Laptops with 4GB of RAM are still common and are going to remain so for the rest of the decade. Spotify using more than 1GB of RAM is obscene.
- throwatdem12311 4mo agoWell we could start by not building ever gd app with f*cking electron.
- tomjakubowski 4mo agoTo be pedantic, Spotify's desktop client uses CEF, not Electron.
- 486sx33 4mo ago[dead]
- josh_p 4mo agoA lot of the commenters here say they’re running Claude or other harnesses inside a VM or with various permissions and levels of access. Am I weird or missing something using pi as my regular harness with gpt models or kimi in essentially yolo mode with mostly all system access? I haven’t experienced negative consequences of this.. yet.. and I don’t know I’d if I will? I don’t think I’m ever letting an agent run For more than 5 minutes before it’s done with the current small task.
- bob1029 4mo agoI run totally unprotected with gpt5.4/5. I've been through thousands of dollars worth of API tokens through both copilot and custom harnesses that have local admin and arbitrary powershell access. I've never seen anything that could even remotely be construed as malicious. I see a lot of people making a really big deal about safety and sandboxing while I'm busy getting shit done. If you can't handle your current source code checkout getting screwed up by a bad prompt, that's on you 1000%. Source control is the answer for anything information over time. Unless you intentionally try to make a scene, these models aren't going to go fuck with your system shell or do anything you couldn't recover from in a few minutes. Connecting chatgpt to the enterprise sql server as sysadmin is not what I'm advocating for. This is another example of "on you, not the AI". There's a tiny amount of nuance you can apply at the edges that makes it easy to allow broad access with negligible risk.
- sollawen 4mo ago[dead]
- m3kw9 4mo agoThis is what happens when their alignment/safety team gets too much say on things.
- UltraSane 4mo agoThis must be for Cowork. I don't have Hyper-V enabled because I prefer to use VMWare workstation so I can't use Cowork.
- aussieguy1234 4mo agoI guess that's one way to run a Linux application on Windows...
- afterfiveguy 4mo agoThere will be a point in time where they will have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, they cannot afford to do it now since the race is still going but we will get there, you can never maintain such a product long term especially with the way they are spitting out features like never before.
- outlore 4mo agoI can’t reconcile the super intelligence koolaid with the objectively bad performance of Claude code. Surely they could have used their “too powerful to release” model to vibe better performance? with a few skills thrown in for good measure. Heck, even throw in an auto research loop
- thewhitetulip 4mo agoI am genuinely curious, does Anthropic use Claude to build claude code and claude desktop? My cc plugin on vscode does not allow me to switch models at all. Always defaults to sonnet and says that the /model will take effect on a new session But if I open a new session it's again the same thing. Model is sonnet
- IronWolve 4mo agoI wonder. I spin up tons of projects, but I do it differently. I'm also on windows. But I'm using a WSL linux vm to do the work. Then I have claude ./sync-to-windows, so the src is copied to a windows share via /mnt/drive/work and I just run a windows built.bat. I have claude take care of the sync/build.bat so it can do things like clear cache, add options, look at logs, etc. This is also how I build multi platform, build on linux, src works on linux/osx/win