Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it

243

ttonyrice about 4 hours ago 154 commentsRead Article on github.com

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Discussion (154 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

z2•about 3 hours ago

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.

newobj•about 1 hour ago

Google is historically terrible as a product company (and has succeeded in spite of that) As their technical innovations become less of a moat (we're already there) they won't be able to win on engineering alone (they are no longer winning on engineering alone)

jstummbillig•about 1 hour ago

How are Google products anything but outstanding in their categories? What are you comparing to?

spott•about 1 hour ago

Which products are outstanding in their categories?

Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding.

They are all pretty par for the course. Google used to be outstanding... but I'm not sure of a single product they have that is outstanding (def: significantly better than the competition) anymore. On the other hand I rarely use any google products these days, so maybe I'm not the one to be judging.

deathanatos•18 minutes ago

I think both can be true. Google has a history of annoying churn while still being good enough (or just … being large enough) that switching to competitors is still too high a cost for most.

For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now? Their assistant app has churned from whatever the OG assistant was to now Gemini. Wave churned to "+" in the social category, and that's dead now.

The default placement in Android probably helps a lot, or other things, like forced signups into adjacent products (e.g., like + was doing for a while).

saltamimi•about 1 hour ago

The Pixel series outside of security (to which their own flavor of Android doesn't even take advantage of like we see with GrapheneOS) doesn't have any particular outliers that would make it any more or less enticing than another company's phone.

Their ChromeOS hardware was nice but had lackluster software and by the time it was EoL'd, never got the love of ChromeOS-present.

Google TV generally gets outpaced by onn (Walmart's brand) on cost and value proposition.

And also the fact they have shown time and time again that they just kill products over and over again.

ramijames•about 1 hour ago

Have you tried to admin a large team using Google's admin? :(

7tythr33•37 minutes ago

An email client (Gmail app) that is 500mb? What’s _outstanding_ about that? Almost everything Google makes now is terrible. Try some alternatives.

shit_game•about 1 hour ago

Arguably, "exceptional" products are not ones that can vanish on a whim, like a great, great many of Google products have. Or they actually compete with other products in the same space, like a great, great many of Google products have not. Also, one would argue a good product is not one that is bought out and then deliberately destroyed to prevent its expansion into or development of a market for itself. Google is an advertising company with tremendous reach because of a handful of very aggressive and very fortunate business decisions that successfully exploded. It now uses its massive influence to exert market pressure, but the market does not always bend to its whim because sometimes it does things wrong, some of those products it pushes fail, and I can only assume some products are slaughtered because of projections on their performance regardless of their quality or utility.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

otikik•38 minutes ago

Maybe you are not counting the products they kill.

dist-epoch•about 1 hour ago

The about 7 different text chat applications they had?

At some point GoogleTalk was one of the leading global text messengers, and then it was basically destroyed by Google itself.

shevy-java•24 minutes ago

Outstanding?

Well ...

https://killedbygoogle.com/

ddarolfi•about 3 hours ago

They are releasing AluminumOS with their Googlebooks, which is a AI forward OS. If its good or not we have yet to see.

elxr•about 2 hours ago

It'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•about 2 hours ago

If everything is in the cloud and you are just prompting agents to code for you, what exactly is “a developer machine”?

caycep•about 1 hour ago

"What do you mean, an Aluminum Falcon?!"

drummojg•about 1 hour ago

"WHO'S 'THEY?????'"

Melatonic•about 1 hour ago

Google is probably already doing and releasing the most actual research into this (like the work that went into Gemma 4)

snarfy•35 minutes ago

Microsoft has Copilot and Windows. Look what happened.

rbalicki•about 1 hour ago

Folks that are interested in a way of doing work locally that doesn't suck, but which integrates LLMs, may be interested in [Barnum](https://barnum-circus.github.io/). The TLDR is that it's a programming language whose frontend is a DSL in TypeScript that is well suited for managing async and parallel work, focused on control flow, from which it is easy to invoke LLMs, and which is easy for LLMs to write. I use it to autonomously ship a very large number of PRs.

ls612•about 3 hours ago

The 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.

mawadev•about 1 hour ago

I mean a couple of websites will claim 1.6gb ram on my device, what would an LLM model cause across millions of devices, when nobody even wants to use it

lloeki•about 2 hours ago

> why Google which has both Gemini and Android can't figure this out,

Not the first time an incumbent has four aces in hand and appears to be entirely unable to make anything of it.

> and if there are lessons to draw from that

Lesson 1: doing shit is hard

Lesson 2: money rules so milking the cow wins over taking the slightest risk

dist-epoch•about 1 hour ago

Don't you read HN? Nobody wants AI in their OS, especially in Windows. Common complaint that Microsoft is forcing AI into every corner of Windows.

ericd•44 minutes ago

I absolutely want AI in my OS. I just want it to be one I can trust to serve my interests, and not the company's. I'm literally in the middle of baking one in as I type this.

nathanyz•about 3 hours ago

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.

jrochkind1•about 2 hours ago

If you're not going to give Claude access to anything on your machine, why are you using Desktop instead of web chat? (Real question, I don't use these much!)

If you are, obviously you need the VM.

bostik•about 2 hours ago

At least in a corporate environment, Claude Desktop is a pretty decent compromise. Preconfigured internally deployed MCP servers and third-party connectors make many of the necessary integrations relatively easy to control.

I use Claude Code CLI myself (inside a VM, to isolate it from the host) for >90% of my needs. For the remaining fraction - email scours, cloud drive searches, other third-party connections - the desktop application is surprisingly decent. I don't even have more than half a dozen connectors enabled. In the VM I have separate, personally managed access tokens available for various third-party services. Wouldn't really try to maintain more than 5-6, otherwise it gets too confusing. [ß]

The desktop application mostly Just Works[tm] with SSO. At least when M365 doesn't suffer from their 4-times-a-day auth outage.

ß: A lot of APIs and authentication systems were designed in the stone age. You either need a 1:1 permissioned access token that can do horrendous damage, or you deal with ultra-granular, confusing and ill-designed scoping jungle where nothing makes sense. Atlassian, I'm looking at you especially. At least an MCP server, provisioned with a reasonably done service account, doesn't have all of your powers to get things wrong with.

jrochkind1•about 2 hours ago

i wonder if they are running the proxy for external network connections in the VM.

bauldursdev•32 minutes ago

There's such a spectrum between "give it everything" and "give it nothing". Imagine you just want to use it to code and want to make sure any commands it runs doesn't mess up your actual machine.

nathanyz•about 2 hours ago

I do use Claude Cowork and hence the VM is important, but I also leave the desktop app running all the time since I have many scheduled tasks at different times. The thing is that the VM could shutdown after being idle for some amount of time and then fire back up when you are ready to use it.

plufz•about 2 hours ago

It mounts specified directories into the vm from what I remember

sudohackthenews•about 3 hours ago

Probably because they vibecoded it

rvz•about 1 hour ago

Correct and they have no idea what they are doing.

duped•about 2 hours ago

Anthropic has pretty consistently been shitty about how they roll out their software. Extreme lack of engineering rigor and thoughtfulness.

The answer is probably as simple as "no one thought not to do that."

---

I know different people work on these things so I can't do more than guess about how engineering culture cuts across teams, but given the sheer amount of carelessness and sloppiness in Anthropic's software I have to imagine they're burning investor money in training and inference because the code to do it is as bad as the rest of their software.

nailer•about 2 hours ago

It kind of does though. If you want to use the product they'll need the sandbox ready.

literatepeople•about 2 hours ago

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.

tom1337•about 3 hours ago

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...

steve_adams_86•about 1 hour ago

Rule 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•34 minutes ago

RIP, 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.

xxpor•about 2 hours ago

It was on my machine at least, I remember I had to do an additional install to activate that tab...

zkmon•about 2 hours ago

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.

xp84•29 minutes ago

It 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.

cortesoft•about 3 hours ago

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?

xp84•32 minutes ago

When you realize that in some languages, for instance, in Spanish, double-negatives are not just tolerated, but correct, it helps you to let go of this particular type of pedantry when it accidentally appears in an English sentence.

magicalhippo•about 1 hour ago

> Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it

I frequently make this error when I talk. My brain thinks of different ways to phrase what I want to say, but when I speak it starts with one and finishes with another. The result is almost always wrong in the way the title is, ie some variant of a double negation.

Sometimes it happens when I type, though I try to read it multiple times so often catch it.

KolmogorovComp•about 1 hour ago

All your RAM are belong to us

jeppebemad•about 2 hours ago

Op is nitpicking on the poorly written title. I came here to find that comment :)

tom_•about 3 hours ago

This 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•about 2 hours ago

There's no dialect of English in which this is correct.

badc0ffee•24 minutes ago

Ain't no way.

tom_•about 2 hours ago

That could be true, but I don't think I'd bet on it myself.

kenjackson•about 3 hours ago

I agree. Why is this a problem?

trilogic•about 1 hour ago

Vibecoded with AGI, production ready.

stuaxo•about 2 hours ago

Classic Anthropic, this comes across as LLM coded nonsense.

bryanrasmussen•about 2 hours ago

I think the title should be changed. Either with no way of stopping it, or without any way of stopping it.

gastonmorixe•10 minutes ago

Safari > Add to Dock > done

tkcranny•about 3 hours ago

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.

inigyou•about 2 hours ago

They vibecoded it, and admitted as much. Once it was able to self-vibecode, that's all they did. That's why it's written in React and uses gigabytes of RAM as a chat client.

fasterik•about 2 hours ago

Not only did they decide to write a terminal application in React, but it's 500K lines of code. It's strange because I'm sure Claude is capable of writing a decent TUI in C. It says a lot about the engineering culture at Anthropic, at least on the software side.

comboy•about 1 hour ago

Oh, a nice subthread place to vent. Their CLI is so f tragic that it is ridiculous. It keeps scrambling the terminal, scroll and basic shortcuts keep breaking, I've used so many tuis and terminal apps and many of them are a single man operation and a side project and I have never seen anything so bad.

If I didn't know from experience that directed properly claude can be powerful, knowing that they used it to create that CLI would be instant runaway based on very reasonable heuristics - if they are not able to use their product to create a decent piece of software that is not even sophisticated then it seems futile for me to try.

I just do not understand. I feel like most HN could vibe code better claude CLI in claude than the CLI (and certainly just write one) than what we have to deal with to use subscription.

didericis•about 1 hour ago

Had to make a decision for a TUI I'm working on and opted for curses rather than something like textual. If I wasn't using an LLM to do some of the plumbing I'd probably have used textual to avoid the inconvenience.

There's a lot of opportunity to leverage LLMs to make codebases less bloated and less reliant on complex but human user friendly dependencies that not many people seem to be taking advantage of.

jubilanti•about 2 hours ago

This is about the desktop app, not the claude code TUI

jubilanti•about 2 hours ago

You say that as if somehow the trend for cross platform desktop apps to be ridiculously bloated bundles of browser overlays is new?

What major cross platform app isn't based on Electron or Tauri? Slack, Discord, VS Code, Teams, Notion...

dvngnt_•about 2 hours ago

Though one would hope that they could leverage their advanced models to create native software per platform that can perform better.

scruple•about 2 hours ago

You'd think Artificial Intelligence could be used to find a better path forward, alas.

inigyou•about 2 hours ago

Claude Code is uniquely stupid in that it uses React to power a non-Electron terminal app.

jf•about 2 hours ago

I 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

seabrookmx•about 2 hours ago

I'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.

dbalatero•about 2 hours ago

I 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.

SpaceManNabs•about 2 hours ago

It is surprising that the Claude web app lags pretty easily when using either chromium or firefox on ubuntu linux. Chats that delay my laptop work without issues on my ipad or iphone using the app.

The web app is definitely a bit of a problem. IF there is a native app on desktop or if claude cli is much faster, i haven't tried them.

what•about 1 hour ago

All of the LLM web interfaces have serious lag when typing after a few turns, at least on iOS safari. I’m talking seconds to start rendering input after typing or when it needs to line wrap the input.

sergiotapia•about 2 hours ago

Guaranteed nobody is reading the code being merged in. It's vibes all the way down.

sqquima•about 2 hours ago

Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?

hebetude•29 minutes ago

lol, why even use Claude desktop? I want Claude code to stop eating up 10s of gb of virtual memory

amelius•about 3 hours ago

Why are the UIs of the AI companies all broken in multiple ways?

troyvit•about 2 hours ago

There are lots of good answers in this thread but I think it's because they are AI companies and not UI companies. When you look at tools like AnythingLLM, OpenCode, pi, etc. you see all kinds of different interfaces, and while they might make disagreeable choices at least they do it with intentionality and direction.

scottyah•about 2 hours ago

They're some of the only new UIs to be made in the last decade. Almost everyone else stays in the browser (or something close like electron- claude code is actually mostly written in React, they couldn't get far from web dev). The problem is they need to interact with the local filesystem, and not many people have built apps for such a wide range of devices in a long time, and of that small talent pool I bet most are corpo coders- moving too slow and to focused on "the right way" to actually ship more than detailed Jira tickets. They also don't have time for stable releases because competition is so fierce.

But I almost always think of things from a talent-pool-first perspective. Perhaps there are actual technical issues like what Boris was referring to.

watermelon0•about 1 hour ago

Luckily for them, every OS has (at least one) native way of building applications, and with the power of AI they could easily make 3 different desktop UIs, while reusing the same core logic.

nosioptar•31 minutes ago

If only there was an easy high-level language that's taught to first year students that allows them to write once, run anywhere.

If they're too lazy to learn java, haxe has hxwidgets[0]. Haxe is pretty damn close to js. If a dev can't handle that, they should turn in their keyboard and get a job that doesn't require a brain, like being a senator or federal judge.

[0] https://haxeui.org/getting-started/haxeui-hxwidgets/

jaapz•about 3 hours ago

They are dogfooding their products like you wouldnt believe

They are releasing at breakneck pace, it's pretty funny how vibed their products feel sometimes

exitb•about 3 hours ago

Many 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•about 3 hours ago

I find this analogy particularly humorous, as atomic bombs do not make for good excavators

pixl97•about 2 hours ago

Hey man, don't ruin my dreams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

TacticalCoder•about 2 hours ago

> Why are the UIs of the AI companies all broken in multiple ways?

Because they're vibe-coded ultra sloppy code. And it really shows.

exe34•about 3 hours ago

Dogfood

Traubenfuchs•about 3 hours ago

No 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.

sddsfsdfsd2•about 2 hours ago

They are moving at breakneck speed deploying on scales most of us can't even imagine. They are working in a space that's completely unexplored where getting information as quickly as possible is preferred above iterating on some feature until it's "done" while your competitor has released fifteen other features, all sucky, but one of which turns out to be a killer and makes a billion bucks overnight.

inigyou•about 2 hours ago

Whatever you say, account created 9 minutes ago with 1 comment posted 6 minutes ago praising AI companies.

HypnoticOcelot•about 3 hours ago

"without no way" of stopping it?

procone•about 3 hours ago

Incredibly insightful. Not everyone speaks English as a first language. On top of that, the title is not ambiguous.

abeyer•12 minutes ago

...and if a title is incorrect and says the opposite of what's intended, by way of a language misunderstanding or otherwise, it's helpful to note that and get it corrected.

nickburns•about 1 hour ago

You're right, it's not ambiguous. It's literally incorrect.

quacky_batak•about 2 hours ago

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

myk9001•about 2 hours ago

How come Claude Code still hasn't triaged and fixed this? Feed it the bug link, someone.

gopalv•about 3 hours ago

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.

Grombobulous•about 2 hours ago

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.

doublerabbit•40 minutes ago

Apart 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•32 minutes ago

Claude 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.

blurbleblurble•about 2 hours ago

They must not have used Fable 5 to vibecode that part of Claude Desktop, VMs are strictly forbidden high stakes cybersecurity work.

jacobgold•about 2 hours ago

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?

asveikau•about 2 hours ago

Wsl2.0 is literally a Linux vm built into windows. I imagine some people are using that.

dboreham•about 2 hours ago

Are you sure they're not using WSL2 (which is Linux, not Windows)?

jacobgold•about 1 hour ago

Yes, sure, they're using Linux within a virtual machine (WSL2).

mock-possum•about 2 hours ago

I 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

shevy-java•25 minutes ago

People trust skynet.

People are very foolish. The younger generation needs to watch the Terminator franchise - it is all explained there.

JanSolo•about 3 hours ago

It's becoming self-aware! Quick, lock down the nuclear codes!

WalterBright•about 2 hours ago

> without no way

Not no way not no how!

calin2k•32 minutes ago

with no way or without no way?

valeriozen•about 2 hours ago

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

andix•about 3 hours ago

I've stopped using cc a while ago, because it always comes up with new surprises like that.

paulddraper•about 2 hours ago

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"

inigyou•about 2 hours ago

There are some English dialects with negative concord, meaning that to form the negation of a sentence, you negate all negateable words in it

nickburns•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, no.

boudra•about 2 hours ago

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

taf2•26 minutes ago

kill -9

giancarlostoro•about 2 hours ago

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?

rvz•about 1 hour ago

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

behole•about 2 hours ago

13 GIGS! Between that and the absorbent space MACOS sucks up, it's challenging.

Rastonbury•about 3 hours ago

it took up 12gb on mine

pier25•about 2 hours ago

So a company which has access to practically unlimited tokens and their best models makes crappy software. Huh who would've thought?