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Comment by ggus | Hacker News Reader

macOS too sadly. by the time you realise there's a problem the machine is already comatose and unresponsive

all these electron apps and invisible virtual machines (looking at you Claude) really don't help.

One of the biggest reason I migrated to Codex. I'd like to see each agentic CLI process as a simple building block, and having 100 claude session means I sometimes run out of memory (and I have 256GB of them). Codex never have this problem.

The communication is more direct too with GPT5.6 family of LLM. No more belt and suspenders.

Macs are also real bad at handling low disk space. I don’t how other OSes do but the best advice on a Mac is to always have a decent amount free.

What’s a decent amount? No idea. Don’t test it :)

When my Intel Mac ran out of disk space once, it became impossible to clear the space without rebooting (due to APFS's annoying journaling crap or whatever -- it would literally say "rm: can not remove [whatever]: no space left on device" or something), which caused Google Chrome to wipe all my local storage and cookies because it loves to do that when you run out of disk space, and there's no way to get that data back even if you do somehow clear space with the browser still running. I've been bitten by this many times on at least four different platforms. I wish it could just keep everything on disk instead of deleting it all? Like anything that deletes my data automatically can just go die in my opinion. This is one of the reasons I don't use Google Chrome anymore, another is how it deletes "old" history too (after 3 months) even if you have terabytes free, which is just so offensive I can't even explain it. Ungoogled Chromium lets you turn some of this stuff off, but when I moved to Mac I just started using Safari.

The only way to save my file system was to boot into recovery mode and run a verification with Disk Utility, then I was able to remove some files and get my space back.

FWIW it didn’t do well under HPFS+ either. It’s not a new problem, though it may manifest differently.

Both MacOS and Windows start having issues if you have less than 10% of the disk free. The problem with the Mac is your ~/Library/Application support/ folder can get huge and take up a ton of space. Mine is currently at 55GB

I've also found that the fastest way to totally lock up a Mac kernel is to have some external hard drive fail while connected. You will be unable to open, quit, force quit, or reboot, and it won't boot up again unless that drive is disconnected.

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