I'd been running into a lot of disk pressure on my system from agents running. I discovered two main causes:
- my approach to using git worktrees for all work. Not entirely surprising, the duplicated build artifacts in each worktree being the main culprit here. There were some limited gains to be had by just being more efficient with how builds were managed but ultimately I just had to limit the number of concurrent features I was working on in a couple of particularly large repos.
- more insidious was the fact I was actually hitting memory limits more than I realised and causing my mac to have to swap heavily. The system was surprisingly still quite performant while this was happening... until it wasn't. Unfortunately as best I can tell the only "fix" when this happens is to restart the machine. There's no way to have the system reclaim any of the swap space once it's written to disk. Which if you have it thrash a couple of times a day (especially easy if you leave something running overnight) adds up very quickly.
switching to copy on write worktrees is the biggest game changer it should become common knowledge pretty soon and it's already available on most operating systems
I'm working on a side project that requires a lot of fine tuning of 3D worlds. Codex ended up creating thousands of artifacts, basically loads of screenshots, in its worktrees, and doesn't clean up after itself.
On a work project, we're moving financial processes from Excel to code, and Codex ended up creating and storing thousands of validation tests unnecessarily. That ended up eating 90GB after we let it loose on a Windows VM that we connected with a custom agent between codex and the VM.
This is definitely a Codex thing and I've never seen this happen in Claude Code or Antigravity.
Rust is notorious for this, one thing some people do is force Rust to have a salvage yard for builds so all those dependencies are shared by everything regardless of what you are building or where, but holy moly, can someone make Rust output smaller files? Hard drives are always having some reason to never go down to sane prices.
When I was younger I thought we would be having exabyte hard drives by now.
If OpenAI's super-intelligence can solve Navier-Stokes why can't they fix this stupid bug that ate up 330GB of my Mac's disk space? come one please triage your github issues?
btw there is a storage section in Chatgpt app settings, showing used space on disk and other related stuff
I'd been running into a lot of disk pressure on my system from agents running. I discovered two main causes:
- my approach to using git worktrees for all work. Not entirely surprising, the duplicated build artifacts in each worktree being the main culprit here. There were some limited gains to be had by just being more efficient with how builds were managed but ultimately I just had to limit the number of concurrent features I was working on in a couple of particularly large repos.
- more insidious was the fact I was actually hitting memory limits more than I realised and causing my mac to have to swap heavily. The system was surprisingly still quite performant while this was happening... until it wasn't. Unfortunately as best I can tell the only "fix" when this happens is to restart the machine. There's no way to have the system reclaim any of the swap space once it's written to disk. Which if you have it thrash a couple of times a day (especially easy if you leave something running overnight) adds up very quickly.
switching to copy on write worktrees is the biggest game changer it should become common knowledge pretty soon and it's already available on most operating systems
I've been making a lot of use of DaisyDisk over the past year: https://daisydiskapp.com
Mole is ok too
TUI version is free, though there is a paid app if that’s your thing
https://github.com/tw93/Mole
DaisyDisk is such a nice app. I just checked and I purchased it over 11 years ago.
They still update it, it works perfectly, no version 2.0 forced obsolescence. Just a nice, reliable tool.
DaisyDisk is great. Mole also found and deleted a bunch of stuff on my mac from Claude, Gemini, etc.
https://github.com/tw93/Mole
I’ve been using it altogether too much this last month and just bought a 4TB USB4 SSD.
And yes, codex is eating my disk, too. Ironically my solution is mostly codex - I have a task which goes around stomping on detritus.
I'm working on a side project that requires a lot of fine tuning of 3D worlds. Codex ended up creating thousands of artifacts, basically loads of screenshots, in its worktrees, and doesn't clean up after itself.
On a work project, we're moving financial processes from Excel to code, and Codex ended up creating and storing thousands of validation tests unnecessarily. That ended up eating 90GB after we let it loose on a Windows VM that we connected with a custom agent between codex and the VM.
This is definitely a Codex thing and I've never seen this happen in Claude Code or Antigravity.
Heh, Claude recently (last couple of weeks) left behind several jj workspaces with many GBs of builds in my env.
Had to tell it to update it's agents.md to not do that...
Codex is obsession with validation tests. It drives me insane.
Agents prefer some sort of tests to check their output.
Rust is notorious for this, one thing some people do is force Rust to have a salvage yard for builds so all those dependencies are shared by everything regardless of what you are building or where, but holy moly, can someone make Rust output smaller files? Hard drives are always having some reason to never go down to sane prices.
When I was younger I thought we would be having exabyte hard drives by now.
Imagine if the vibe-coders get their way and we see this level of bloat and bugginess at EVERY level of the software stack. Everything would collapse.
Good example of SLOP coding from openAI. No wonder they cant keep agents from committing felonies.
If OpenAI's super-intelligence can solve Navier-Stokes why can't they fix this stupid bug that ate up 330GB of my Mac's disk space? come one please triage your github issues?
See this: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/25921#issuecomment-62...
because they'd need to pay a real mathematician to verify the proof they claim.