>if you ever dared to use cowork, only once, will run a 2GB VM on app start, no f's given. at all.

Of all the issues, this seems like the most tame. I mean, there are single Chrome tabs that can use 300MB or even 700MB. A 2GB VM for what is likely isolated local testing of scripts and commands or local lightweight first-level inference to help guide the main harness sounds reasonable.

Not being able to use my own harness on the subscription plan is my biggest gripe with Anthropic/Claude. For what I work on, I still get better results with Opus than I do with GPT5.5-codex, but damn do I hate that I either have to PAYG or I'm stuck using Claude Code.

I haven’t ever tried Cowork, and Claude Desktop shipped a 10 GB VM image on the tiny internal storage of my Macbook.

No way to remove it without hacks like creating an empty, read-only file in its place.

Having this slop installed and automatically updating is a liability.