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 problems can be solved really well by first writing custom-tailored scripts against whatever task you throw at it. We'd like that computer to not be _your_ computer so that Claude is free to configure it in the moment.

(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.

(3) As a product of 1+2, more safety for non-technical users. If you're reading this, you're probably equipped to evaluate whether or not a particular script or command is safe to run - but most humans aren't, and even the ones who are so often experience "approval fatigue". Not having to ask for approval is valuable.

It's a real trade-off though and I'm thankful for any feedback, including this one. We're reading all the comments and have some ideas on how to maybe make this better - for people who don't want to use Cowork at all, who don't want it inside a VM, or who just want a little bit more control. Thank you!

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.

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 stage of scaled-up research into collaborative computing.

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

I also noticed this 10GB VM from CoWork. And was also surprised at just how much space various things seem to use for no particular reason. There doesn't seem to be any sort of cleanup process in most apps that actually slims down their storage, judging by all the cruft.

Even Xcode. The command line tools installs and keeps around SDKs for a bunch of different OS's, even though I haven't launched Xcode in months. Or it keeps a copy of the iOS simulator even though I haven't launched one in over a year.

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?

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.

i kept telling myself this BUT NEVER ELECTRON AGAIN.

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.

> Filed via Claude Code

I assume part of it is true, but determining which part is true is the hard part. I’ve lost a lot of time chasing AI-written bug reports that were actually something else wrong with the user’s computer. I’m assuming the claims of “75% faster” and other numbers are just AI junk, but at least someone could verify if the 10GB VM exists.

Try this if you have claude code -- ls -a your home dir and see all the garbage claude creates.

so crazy on a windows desktop I at most complain if it is hardcoded to the system drive (looking at you ollama)

Storage should be cheaper, complain about Apple making you pay a premium.

So contrary to the github issue, my problem is that it's not enough space. So the fix is to navigate to ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/vm_bundles, and then ask Claude Code to upsize the disk to a sparse 60 GiB file, giving cowork much more space to work in while not immediately taking up 60 GiB.

Bigger picture, what this teaches me though, is that my knowledge is still useful in guiding the AI to be able to do things, so I'm not obsolete yet!

Pondering... Noodling... Some other nonsense...