Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use
github.com
github.com
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.
Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Support is part of the package when it comes to product and their support SUCKS.
I would absolutely NEVER use GCP for any business I was in charge of. Google cannot be trusted.
They were at the time.
I guess those gaussian splats on Apple Maps could be p. neat.
If I’m dealing with adware either way, may as well use the best.
OsmAnd’s UI really doesn’t suit me, and there are a few others that I personally liked even less.
But Organic Maps ticks enough boxes to come close. I’ve been using Organic Maps on iOS for driving, and it’s tolerable. And for offline mapping it’s a godsend.
Not only does an upstart have to overcome the switching costs, they have to actually survive, and not just get hoovered up by acquisition and then Our-Incredible-Journeyed.
As far as I can tell, if judged by the marketplace (and breaking ties with which product I like better), Google has run away with the ball on all of those, and Gemini seems to at least be competitive.
The only major product I'd say they've sunk below acceptability on is Search, which is demonstrably dogshit now...though I suspect it's more that they have changed their definition of what Search is for, from "helping users efficiently find other websites that are useful to them" to "A convenient on-ramp to, many times per day, capture the current user intent and steer them toward something that earns Google some ad revenue."
I also can’t do wildcard filters on “to” or “from”. For example, in my GApps I have it set up to route all emails not associated with a specific user to my primary user. So that it’s easier to make throwaway emails. I want to filter all to:`X.X@domain.tld` to a certain folder. No can do.
It just feels restricted.
You can filter based on the to: field, yes.
For many years I’ve been creating filters on free Gmail for to:, from:, subject:, etc. I set them up on desktop web.
Perhaps there is something more specific you’re trying to do?
> a major feature gap that Gmail (paid or free) cannot create filters on headers.
You can create filters on header fields like from:, to:, and subject:, so I am guessing you mean something different than “cannot create filters on headers”?
1. Open the specific email.
2. Click the three vertical dots (More options icon) next to the "Reply" button.
3. Select "Show original" from the dropdown menu.
Also, more items that might help OP (as I can’t edit parent comment) - they mentioned wanting to use wildcards on to: field. Those header fields do allow specifying just part of the header, like just the domain, or one part of the to address. (But those match at word boundaries and I’m not aware of being able to match sub parts of words or more complex items.)
Regardless, I don’t think I’d call this a “major” feature gap - maybe minor or more of a niche feature.
GMail and Google Maps were revolutionary when they came out, sure, but the vast majority of Google's products now are... fine? at best? And a lot of their "big products" were acquisitions that they absorbed in order to further the core goal of the business - to organize all the world's information and use it to serve ads to people.
Meanwhile, Google has a litany of products they've started internally, launched, ran for a while, and then let stagnate or canned entirely; anecdotally I've heard that this is because your bonuses at Google hinge on your ability to launch a product and not your ability to support a product, so it's beneficial to get something launched and then immediately leave to go launch another project rather than polish the one you just launched into something to be proud of.
I'm not sure if that's true, but it would certainly explain a lot; if Google launches something and it's bad or it doesn't click, they just give up on it. Google Wave, a half-dozen chat apps that I can think of, Stadia, and dozens of others. Things that Google launched, which had problems or didn't hit mass adoption instantly, and then just petered out and were retired with all of the time and energy and money put into them arguably wasted - products that people wanted, and wanted to succeed, but which weren't revolutionary successes at launch so they weren't worth further investment.
Meanwhile, they (and most of the industry) are pushing AI for some reason despite the fact that almost no one actually wants AI to be the only way that people interact with information.
This all reinforces what I've been saying about Google for decades: they're not creating things that users want to use, they're creating things that they want users to use. Sometimes those things align, but when they don't then it's not worth further investment (except, apparently, AI).
Gmail is the most popular email service in the world, people are always telling me how they prefer Google Docs over everything else and their only competition is Microsoft.
Yes it’s free but there is no other service that I rather switch to, and I actually pay for additional storage.
But as others have mentioned, they operating model of Google as a company incentivises creating products but does not incentivise refining it. Gmail has gotten far richer in functionality but at the same time the interface has gotten far less consistent. Their competitors (mainly Microsoft but not only them) also got richer functionality, but they also paid attention to UX. While none are perfect, there are definitely some better than others. Familiarity definitely breeds inertia though, I’ll grant that.
Google doc is wordpad level with very good collaboration (but that’s mostly what people need). People were fine with typewriters, so they are fine with a word processor like google doc. But it’s not at the level of even Libreoffice or Apple’s page in terms of features.
It's not about why this or that person would want to install the MS Office on their Mac (millions do after all). So the pointed flew above their head.
It's about the point that many people having to use Google Docs are doing so because corporate wants them to. (In fact most people using MS Office do it because it's a work requirement too).
That's because it's been around for quite a while, and for a long time it was the best webmail service. It's also free, unlike most alternatives. And switching to a new provider means a new email address, unless you're using a custom domain with Google Workspace (or whatever they call it these days), which is a small minority of personal accounts.
(I gave up on Gmail a few years ago and switched to Fastmail, and like it much more than Gmail. But I'm the rare person who is willing to pay for email, and had been using a custom domain with Gmail, so my non-monetary switching costs were minimal.)
We're so used to setting webapps do this that we take this for granted, but Gmail was the first email webapp to do this. It's possible it was the first webapp, period, to do this; I feel like Gmail's use of XmlHttpRequest was innovative at the time.
Fast forward twenty years, and what about Gmail is innovative today? Nothing that I can think of. It's mediocre (there are lots of filtering improvements they could make that they aren't making, for example), and everything that made it good has been copied by other webmail clients. There's no particular reason except momentum to stay on Gmail.
Now that Pobox is owned by Fastmail, I rather suspect that Fastmail is going to have the same good spam filtering. Can't speak from experience, though, as I haven't actually used my new Fastmail account yet (it still forwards to Gmail, and so far I haven't switched. Momentum, again).
Is that... good? I mean take maps -- what more can possibly be done to that product that wouldn't just make it worse? It's done. The fact that's the default choice for mapping and just works is fantastic really. There aren't any competitors doing anything revolutionary either because there isn't anything revolutionary to be done.
The last time i tried using gmaps i got ads and the thing could figure out where i was on the roads. It was comical as i always remembered google maps being better than apple. Today tho, apple beats them hands down.
Googles products that do not get cancelled are pretty mediocre in todays market. They can build useful things but if it doesnt have ads in it, it gets axed
Is this missing a "not"?
Personally I much prefer Fastmail to Gmail. The site is way faster and more cohesively designed. Fastmail supports jmap, and way more imap extensions (including push support on Apple mail). They have helpful humans handling support requests. And they do all of that with what seems like 1/10th or less the number of employees.
The only thing I like more about Gmail is their native mobile apps. Fastmail’s official mobile app is a web view.
MS is the overwhelming favorite in each of these markets if you only consider paying users.
¹literally, phones can now demand you put them in A/C b/c they're dying
²I reported once that a jetway was 3D modeled as being like 8 stories high. Google couldn't confirm that, and closed the request. I reported a business as not being present, while my GPS showed me as being at the alleged address, that also couldn't be confirmed. My GPS trace would have seen me walk the whole block, twice!
³as designated navigator in my relationship, I can tell her "leftish" or "rightish", and she understands what I mean. Where I live a lot of the intersections' designs appear as if a civil engineer was given artistic license, and so sometimes the direction is "5-way intersection, left-ish". "Left" is a bad direction when there are two lefts. Of course … me & her have developed a fairly extensive lexicon over years of long road trips, too.
It has support for phones overheating in the sun. I don't think any phone can get to overwhelming temperatures by itself.
Maps & Gmail & Search all have plenty of accumulating flaws... but they also completely defined their product category and today are among the most popular software products ever made.
Apple Maps and Waze is better for directions. Apple has better CarPlay integration and HUD. Google Maps is way better at searching for things like restaurants or local businesses but not as much the nav part.
"among the most popular" doesn't need either of those to be true.
Few here would argue that it’s an outstanding product.
Are those people in the room with us now?
I have to use Gmail at work and it is just terrible.
I don’t think it has a public interface, though. It’s really a developer resource.
What are you comparing to?
At the enterprise level, if you know of something better than Bigquery, please let me know.
Similarly, Kubernetes and Kubeflow are both outstanding - and Licenses Kubernetes has no meaningful competition for what it does - but Google did everyone a solid by making them open source, so you can get them from other sources than Google. But the Google managed versions are certainly extremely good.
As for the idea that Gmail, search, and Maps aren’t outstanding, an easy way to refute that is to ask what the outstanding alternatives are. I doubt there’s a single list that many people would agree on.
I can't imagine that no other 'Google Workspace' organizations want to actually save their employee data rather than irrevocably delete it forever.
At some point GoogleTalk was one of the leading global text messengers, and then it was basically destroyed by Google itself.
All of them named "Hangouts" no doubt.
Well ...
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).
I believe they’ve had at least 58 different products with chat / messaging.
https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/s2s2ld/all_of_googl...
Just today I tried a query for water filters and 1/3 of the results were ads. The other third were product pictures, or businesses in close proximity based on my ip. Then there was a box with related products/services, which was completely irrelevant to my needs, a second box with places, yet more product images and so on and so forth. Practically 70% of the real estate of the page was occupied by things I didn’t ask for. All I want is a list of relevant sites to go there and judge for myself. I don’t want Google to spoon feed me.
The bad rep Google gets now is because while they've polished their nice money machine very well, they haven't done much to pioneer new segments and the old stuff is pretty stagnant. When's the last time Gmail gained a must-have feature? Maps?
Ok but maybe those old products are just mature and there's not much room for product innovation? Even if we assume that's the case (though there are third party email and calendar apps that I use instead of Google's first-party ones on my phone), let's look at some newer stuff:
Android was a copy of Blackberry that turned into a copy of Apple before being launched. It's done well numbers-wise, particularly in lower-cost markets, but hasn't got a lot of novel product stuff going on in the last decade or more. Less luck as a tablet platform. A lot of the nifty novel stuff in mobile space (wireless earbuds, "find my" stuff, mobile payments, magnetic wireless charging) was done first by Apple.
Meet vs anything else - well, Meet is cheap if you're already on Gsuite, at least.
Voice/Hangouts/Chat/Duo/Whatever - whole lotta abandonware or dead attempts.
Google Plus - famously mis-targeted product.
Google Assistant - Siri copycat then with Alexa copycat hardware. Didn't do anything novel.
Chromecast - nice novel product, caught on decently well, lost the market to a combo of set-top boxes (Roku, Apple) and native-TV integrations. Tried doing Google TV as that native platform with a copycat pivot vs the original Chromecast, no particular success.
Stadia - abandoned quickly, never set itself apart from the things it was copying.
Smart home hardware (like alarms and smoke alarms) - dramatically scaled back and now pretty unambitious.
Gemini - copycat of ChatGPT which is particular damning since so much of the original research came from Google in the first place!
And also Go. While I'm not a Go guy (speaking as a C# and Rust guy, I did wrote a good amount of Go before) it has a huge dominance in Cloud-Native application. For one, Zitadel, an alternative to Keycloak, is written in Go and only takes a fraction of what Keycloak needs.
Flutter/Dart is catching up, but the ecosystem is still relatively weak.
Dart is also complete shit: Speed of javascript with verbosity of Java. Who the hell though that was a good idea?
...well, AI infra stacks are more or less k8s/cloud native, especially on the inference side. Nvidia GPU operator plus KubeFlow makes deploying models easy, and I did that manually as well using just the ollama, llama.cpp containers and especially vllm operator. I'm not sure about what's the measuring notation of "large" is, but OpenAI had a blog post about how to manage 7500+ nodes Kubernetes (https://openai.com/index/scaling-kubernetes-to-7500-nodes/). That's 5 years ago and I speculate it will only be even more.
> completely re-implemented under the hood for anything halfway serious
...an example please? I'm building a platform to deploy hundreds of open source apps on Kubernetes, you know, the boring thing you can do with a VPS and maybe use Docker Compose to start -- with an ergonomic twist. I relied on so many features of what Kubernetes and its ecosystem provided, especially with persistent volume, volume snapshot, CRDs and cron job, and all of it is just composed from open source and cloud native software...I'm not sure if that sounds "half way serious" to you.
I know those boring monolithic apps can be done with a VPS, as I exactly came from that background, and I know what the shitty points of having just a VPS are. You don't have a clean control plane, you don't have HA, you don't have distributed storage, and you have to be super aware of the apps that you are deploying with Docker Compose.
What you would think "completely re-implemented under the hood for anything halfway serious", perhaps it means that you don't want to get in the fuzz to manage the complexity and prefer to trade for a far simpler but more primitive solution, and that's totally fine.
Pro tip: Codex seems to love generating great Helm charts so much for some reason unknown. I tried GPT-5.4 high in codex and it easily beats Opus 4.7 max on my own internal helm chart generation benchmark evaluation, which measures HA, deployment and app-specific probes. I've given source code to both Codex and Opus and research about the app config structure, and Codex did so well to just generate secret key-value and convert it to JSON and environ, while Opus insisted on using a dynamic generator at runtime.
> Nomad was cool though
Ahem. I used to deploy Nomad too, but I found it too underwhelming, especially with the networking side of thing.
Consul is perhaps one of the most hated thing in my entire career that I would call it bullshit. I know that later Nomad has its own Raft mode, but the Consul brain rot to me is already very sickening such that I don't want to touch Nomad no more. Vault is fine though, but I prefer OpenBao now.
> Dart is also complete shit: Speed of javascript with verbosity of Java
I don't get where the "speed of javascript" is from. Dart/Flutter is JIT on dev mode, and AOT compiled on production, is that you didn't get the compiler options right?
You are confusing Kubernetes, the software project with Kubernetes, the container orchestration system.
There are many Kubernetes distributions out there which are not maintained in any way by Google. Even Canonical provides its own Kubernetes implementation.
Nowadays Kubernetes is a keyword much like Unix or Unix-like.
Neither Go nor Kubernetes are even remotely moats.
Whereas Go only exists because a bunch of renowed Oberon and UNIX heads did not want to keep using C++ for their work, and got twice lucky, first with their line manager, secondly with Docker and Kubernetes getting adoption after their rewrites into Go.
Gmail: Reliably excellent spam filtering (for most users).
Outlook.com: Reliably excellent at losing validation emails.
that said, Gmail finds lots of other ways to inflict misery (Gemini beat-downs) and I'd rather work in Excel online that Sheets.
I don’t specifically like these but they are much better than microsoft for an example
Docs was acquired (writely)
I’d say they are batting .250 like everyone else.
“Don’t be evil”
I'm leery about just giving an LLM free run of my laptop, but with reasonable restrictions on which app(s) it can access and how many steps it can do before checking in, and maybe even a throttle on how fast it works, I'd be fine (I'm not in a hurry and I can learn by watching it work at double-speed). It doesn't have to be mil-spec locked down, it's not like I have production code accessible or millions in crypto keys, the biggest downside would be a few hours hosing out and restoring the laptop, which would be annoying but not the end of the world.
I get those that say, "just spin up a VM and run it there", but I 'spin up a VM' rarely enough that the versions have changed and UXs drifted enough that it's exactly the kind of thing I'd actually want the LLMs help to do without me being a cut-paste bot. I'm mostly Windows at the moment and I don't understand why MSFT insists on spamming LLM features everywhere except the one place I'd not only use it, but pay for it. The usage model could be as simple and intuitive as a Zoom remote desktop share with a collaborator. That's already constrained and users have a mental model for the interaction pattern.
I asked Gemini earlier today to search recent user reviews of the latest 'drive my Windows desktop for me' and it reported that the capability is still slow, expensive, and prone to getting lost navigating the interface or interpreting window boundaries etc.
Anyone have any suggestions for my lightweight, casual use case?
It seems easier to do just a screenshot and click.
> 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.
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.
Claude Code itself is incredibly buggy and as we have seen the codebase is a complete mess of slop.
If you are, obviously you need the VM.
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.
This whole thing seems kind of silly to me I must admit. It seems obvious that Claude Desktop needs a VM for security for the majority of it's actual real world use. VM's take up memory, yeah. Them's the breaks. If other competitors have managed to provide as good (or ideally better) security scenario with less RAM, that would be interesting, but just complaining about it seems weird and uninformed to me.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1rlc71n/claude_de...
At least you can buy usb-c nubs fairly cheaply these days.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When management at $DAYJOB brought the hammer down and said, "Everyone has to use genAI all the time, OR ELSE," I expected to be blown away by the tool I was avoiding due to ethical concerns, aesthetic objections, humanism, and long-term thinking.
I was born away, but not in a good way.
The CLI is _bad_. I've seen it randomly fail to render anything at all on the terminal multiple times. It has a vim-mode, but it's painfully buggy, and I can literally outrun it - if I try to type too quickly after hitting Esc for normal mode, it just doesn't return to normal mode. It's I was keeping track of the bugs in the Claude TUI, but gave up because it was taking _too much of my time_ to do so.
If nothing else, I'd say Claude shows convincingly that success is not the default for vibecoding.
Yes, it technically does the job, and no, I don't think I've ever used a worse TUI.
What major cross platform app isn't based on Electron or Tauri? Slack, Discord, VS Code, Teams, Notion...
Calibre, VLC, all the jetbrains suite, Sublime, Unity, Unreal, CodeBlocks, Adobe’s stuff,…
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.
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.
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.
They are releasing at breakneck pace, it's pretty funny how vibed their products feel sometimes
Mythos, Fable, please do the thing with the VM. Make no mistakes.
Because they're vibe-coded ultra sloppy code. And it really shows.
Not on the client, they're not. It's a chatbot as glue between different backend systems.
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.
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.
Did all the Qt developers go to mars?
1. micro VM
2. agent on the VM
3. software bundled into the VM
It's self-modifying apps that are sealed off from touching parts of the computer they shouldn't.
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
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"
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
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.
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.
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
It is written in Rust™, surely it is better than the rest of them.
Not no way not no how!
It seems like the VM is a core part of how you use the application.
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
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.
People are very foolish. The younger generation needs to watch the Terminator franchise - it is all explained there.
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?
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
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
/s
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.
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.