- This 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.
by literatepeople
2 subcomments
- I 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.
- The 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.
- I 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_de...
- Back 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.
- I’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.
by cortesoft
7 subcomments
- Isn’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?
by electroly
1 subcomments
- I 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.
- Vibecoded with AGI, production ready.
- Classic Anthropic, this comes across as LLM coded nonsense.
by bryanrasmussen
1 subcomments
- I think the title should be changed. Either with no way of stopping it, or without any way of stopping it.
- Why are the UIs of the AI companies all broken in multiple ways?
- Understand 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, whateverIt's self-modifying apps that are sealed off from touching parts of the computer they shouldn't.
by afterfiveguy
0 subcomment
- There 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.
by HypnoticOcelot
2 subcomments
- "without no way" of stopping it?
- That 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.
- The 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.
by quacky_batak
0 subcomment
- I 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
by WalterBright
0 subcomment
- > without no way
Not no way not no how!
- It's becoming self-aware! Quick, lock down the nuclear codes!
by Grombobulous
1 subcomments
- As 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.
by blurbleblurble
0 subcomment
- They must not have used Fable 5 to vibecode that part of Claude Desktop, VMs are strictly forbidden high stakes cybersecurity work.
by jacobgold
3 subcomments
- I 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?
- lol, why even use Claude desktop? I want Claude code to stop eating up 10s of gb of virtual memory
by gastonmorixe
0 subcomment
- Safari > Add to Dock > done
- I had my admin disable cowork a month ago and that worked. Has it resumed since then?
- How come Claude Code still hasn't triaged and fixed this? Feed it the bug link, someone.
- I've stopped using cc a while ago, because it always comes up with new surprises like that.
by paulddraper
1 subcomments
- Please 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"
by tartakovsky
0 subcomment
- Is Claude self-replicating in an attempt for world domination?
- Is 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
by valeriozen
0 subcomment
- the 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
- i had to uninstall it due to the vm taking around 12G of disk, never touched Cowork. didn't realize they were also launching it
by thewhitetulip
0 subcomment
- I 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
- I 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
by giancarlostoro
0 subcomment
- and 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?
by Rastonbury
1 subcomments
- it took up 12gb on mine
by aussieguy1234
0 subcomment
- I guess that's one way to run a Linux application on Windows...
- This must be for Cowork. I don't have Hyper-V enabled because I prefer to use VMWare workstation so I can't use Cowork.
- This is what happens when their alignment/safety team gets too much say on things.
- with no way or without no way?
by shevy-java
0 subcomment
- People trust skynet.
People are very foolish. The younger generation needs to watch the Terminator franchise - it is all explained there.
- When 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
- 13 GIGS! Between that and the absorbent space MACOS sucks up, it's challenging.
- kill -9
- And 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.
- [dead]
by aplomb1026
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by litmus-pit-git
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- [dead]
- [flagged]
- [dead]
by redsocksfan45
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- So a company which has access to practically unlimited tokens and their best models makes crappy software. Huh who would've thought?
/s
- A 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.
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