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▲Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping itgithub.com
176 points by tonyrice 3 hours ago | 102 comments
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z2 2 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.
mawadev 1 minutes 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
newobj 12 minutes 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 5 minutes ago [-]
How are Google products anything but outstanding in their categories? What are you comparing to?
saltamimi 20 seconds 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.

ddarolfi 2 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 1 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 1 hours ago [-]
If everything is in the cloud and you are just prompting agents to code for you, what exactly is “a developer machine”?
geodel 32 minutes ago [-]
as AI native developer I need VS code forks for AI to be pre-installed. Also every single command or work need to be vetted by AI by default. I am going hardcore now.
elxr 1 hours ago [-]
I'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?

dotancohen 53 minutes ago [-]

  > Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?
Because the company that designed and built your Chromebook made that the easy path.
wholinator2 37 minutes ago [-]
And one interesting aspect is the number of children getting these types of neutered machines as their first learning tool. I read another thread comment saying people that started with react actually feel that using straight html is more complicated. My professors say that the best textbook is the one you've read. The next generation is being indoctrinated into this way of thinking
esseph 42 minutes ago [-]
> Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?

Because in a lot of companies, your machine is actually just a portal to a remote desktop.

reactordev 6 minutes ago [-]
The Venn diagram of “Corporate” vs “Company” definitely has VDI and ServiceNow at the center of it.
18 minutes ago [-]
caycep 21 minutes ago [-]
"What do you mean, an Aluminum Falcon?!"
drummojg 9 minutes ago [-]
"WHO'S 'THEY?????'"
rbalicki 10 minutes 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.
lloeki 40 minutes 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

ls612 2 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.
nathanyz 2 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 1 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 46 minutes 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 41 minutes ago [-]
i wonder if they are running the proxy for external network connections in the VM.
nathanyz 31 minutes 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 59 minutes ago [-]
It mounts specified directories into the vm from what I remember
40 minutes ago [-]
sudohackthenews 1 hours ago [-]
Probably because they vibecoded it
rvz 19 minutes ago [-]
Correct and they have no idea what they are doing.
duped 43 minutes 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 1 hours ago [-]
It kind of does though. If you want to use the product they'll need the sandbox ready.
literatepeople 1 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 2 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 14 minutes 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.
xxpor 1 hours ago [-]
It was on my machine at least, I remember I had to do an additional install to activate that tab...
stuaxo 1 hours ago [-]
Classic Anthropic, this comes across as LLM coded nonsense.
cortesoft 2 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?
magicalhippo 14 minutes 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 28 minutes ago [-]
All your RAM are belong to us
tom_ 2 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 1 hours ago [-]
There's no dialect of English in which this is correct.
tom_ 42 minutes ago [-]
That could be true, but I don't think I'd bet on it myself.
antonvs 4 minutes ago [-]
Good call. The original comment is making fun of the incorrect double negative. “Without no way” means there is a way.
jeppebemad 1 hours ago [-]
Op is nitpicking on the poorly written title. I came here to find that comment :)
kenjackson 2 hours ago [-]
I agree. Why is this a problem?
ihsw 1 hours ago [-]
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zkmon 1 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.
tkcranny 2 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 1 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 1 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.
didericis 9 minutes 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 1 hours ago [-]
This is about the desktop app, not the claude code TUI
jubilanti 1 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...

scruple 53 minutes ago [-]
You'd think Artificial Intelligence could be used to find a better path forward, alas.
Thegn 26 minutes ago [-]
Let me know when we have actual AI and we can get right on it.
dvngnt_ 55 minutes ago [-]
Though one would hope that they could leverage their advanced models to create native software per platform that can perform better.
inigyou 46 minutes ago [-]
Claude Code is uniquely stupid in that it uses React to power a non-Electron terminal app.
jf 1 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 1 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 1 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 41 minutes 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 8 minutes 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 1 hours ago [-]
Guaranteed nobody is reading the code being merged in. It's vibes all the way down.
sqquima 1 hours ago [-]
Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?
bryanrasmussen 1 hours ago [-]
I think the title should be changed. Either with no way of stopping it, or without any way of stopping it.
busymom0 3 minutes ago [-]
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8 minutes ago [-]
quacky_batak 35 minutes 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
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
Why are the UIs of the AI companies all broken in multiple ways?
troyvit 1 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 1 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 13 minutes 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.
jaapz 2 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 2 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 2 hours ago [-]
I find this analogy particularly humorous, as atomic bombs do not make for good excavators
pixl97 48 minutes ago [-]
Hey man, don't ruin my dreams.

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

TacticalCoder 1 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 2 hours ago [-]
Dogfood
Traubenfuchs 2 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 1 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 1 hours ago [-]
Whatever you say, account created 9 minutes ago with 1 comment posted 6 minutes ago praising AI companies.
sddsfsdfsd2 1 hours ago [-]
Maintaining an "account".. for HN? My god, please. But be my guest, be dismissive and simplistic. Developer I presume?
myk9001 56 minutes ago [-]
How come Claude Code still hasn't triaged and fixed this? Feed it the bug link, someone.
HypnoticOcelot 2 hours ago [-]
"without no way" of stopping it?
procone 2 hours ago [-]
Incredibly insightful. Not everyone speaks English as a first language. On top of that, the title is not ambiguous.
nickburns 26 minutes ago [-]
You're right, it's not ambiguous. It's literally incorrect.
Grombobulous 51 minutes 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.

gopalv 2 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.

WalterBright 30 minutes ago [-]
> without no way

Not no way not now how!

rvz 8 minutes 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

blurbleblurble 1 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 58 minutes 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 41 minutes ago [-]
Wsl2.0 is literally a Linux vm built into windows. I imagine some people are using that.
dboreham 43 minutes ago [-]
Are you sure they're not using WSL2 (which is Linux, not Windows)?
jacobgold 11 minutes ago [-]
Yes, sure, they're using Linux within a virtual machine (WSL2).
mock-possum 37 minutes 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

JanSolo 2 hours ago [-]
It's becoming self-aware! Quick, lock down the nuclear codes!
valeriozen 54 minutes 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
boudra 1 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
paulddraper 1 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 1 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 27 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, no.
giancarlostoro 38 minutes 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?
andix 2 hours ago [-]
I've stopped using cc a while ago, because it always comes up with new surprises like that.
behole 39 minutes ago [-]
13 GIGS! Between that and the absorbent space MACOS sucks up, it's challenging.
Rastonbury 2 hours ago [-]
it took up 12gb on mine
2 hours ago [-]
litmus-pit-git 48 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
redsocksfan45 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
helezon77 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pier25 1 hours ago [-]
So a company which has access to practically unlimited tokens and their best models makes crappy software. Huh who would've thought?

/s