Comment by InsideOutSanta
7 hours ago
All of the harnesses I've used are terrible at cleaning up after themselves. They leave all kind of clutter behind, to the point where on my dev VM, I now have an LLM run once a day to just look through the disk and delete everything that looks like it's leftover garbage.
It's like fighting fire by employing an arsonist.
Running an LLM to delete files seems like overkill to me. Couldn't a cron job do the same thing? Or is the clutter just put into random places, which, if true, seems like bad software, which then leads me to consider the output of LLMs in general, which then leads me to wonder why are we doing this?
But, I'm just wondering.
Oh it makes all sorts of temporary files and directories, sometimes in the right places as per UNIX filesystem conventions, but often not.
Installed "clor.com" and it got into a loop of downloading its docker image from ghcr them throwing it away immediately because it was supposedly out of date (iirc). 65mbps continuous transfers for a week until I looked at my network traffic and saw 500gb of rx per day.
Sisyphus' updater
I just erased 20GB of Cursor’s cruft.
Is that cruft or past conversation history / subagent history and observability logs?
Just garbage. Temp files, worktrees that weren't removed after subagents finished, build files... all kinds of things.
But that's agent behavior, and not harness responsibility...?
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Over eager use of /tmp is the worst. That’s RAM, my boy! Precious gold.
I don't think that's always true.
Although I just looked into it, and even Ubuntu 26.04 appear to default to tmpfs for /tmp storage, so I guess it's fairly universal now.
Not sure if I agree with that idea in principle... What's wrong with just wiping it intermittently??
It’s RAM unless you have swap enabled.
Harness problem, or model problem?
Let's be real, what do you think wrote the harness?
> I now have an LLM run once a day to just look through the disk and delete everything that looks like it's leftover garbage
...are you sure it wouldn't consider your personal files garbage?
"In my dev VM". Everything of value in there is in a git repo.