Developers Frustrated with Dev Tools
15 posts across 7 communities in the last 30 days; 53% from r/SideProject.
“my mac kept running out of RAM and i'd just close random apps hoping it helps (it usually doesn't). turns out a lot of it is stuff you can't see: gradle still running after you quit android studio, simulators booted in the background, dev servers and headless browsers that AI…”
“Why are you reinventing the wheel? Take some time to learn about what tools already exist to solve your problem. Imagine if every idiot reinvented Microsoft word.”
“of course its another mac cleaner app. Hazel has been doing this for like 15 years, you write rules in it and it sorts everything before you even look at it, and it costs less than a takeout meal. Also the name. Declutr. Why does every single app drop the e now, is the vowel…”
Developers are experiencing pain points related to storage space consumed by development tools like Xcode and Docker. This has led to the creation of solutions aimed at cleaning up developer-specific junk and reclaiming disk space.
SOURCES (26)
“It’s a tiny creature that lives in your menu bar. Its face shows your Mac’s health at a glance: Sick: memory pressure Sweaty: running hot or the CPU is pinned Sleepy: low battery Stuffed: the disk is nearly full Happy: all good The part I…”
“Every month, I end up with a pile of files that aren't useful, and deleting them is a pain. So I reused Tinder's interface for keeping or deleting the files. You get a big preview, so it's easy and quick to make a decision. None of the files are permanently deleted. They go to the trash. So in case you want to retrieve them, you can. It also automatically groups the files in the "Duplicates" folder if there are duplicates, and "Old files" if they have been there f”
“my mac kept running out of RAM and i'd just close random apps hoping it helps (it usually doesn't). turns out a lot of it is stuff you can't see: gradle still running after you quit android studio, simulators booted in the background, dev servers and headless browsers that AI agents started and forgot. baa sits in the menu bar and: - finds those leftovers and shows how much RAM you'd get back - frees them in one click (never kills anything on its own) - warns you before you run o”
“RemoveMacAI turns off apple intelligence and other macOS 27 bloat, it started as a cli and 1.0 is a full app now the people who need it most aren't developers, so i want to know where a normal user gets stuck especially the first launch, it's not notarized yet so you have to hit Open Anyway in privacy & security, and then approving the configuration profile in system settings free, open source, apple silicon on macOS 27 https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI any feedback in the comm”
“its a terminal built for people running Claude Code and Codex all day. 15MB vs iTerm2 at 176MB, launches in ~250ms, idles at 62MB. sidebar per tab with branch, folder and ports, panes turn orange when they stop for input, and agent sessions survive quitting the app. built on libghostty. Apple Silicon only for now, MIT licensed. site: https://helium-terminal.bensarmiento.com/ source: https://github.com/yowmamasita/helium-terminal submitted by /u/yowmamasita [link] [comments]”
“You can feed their landing page into your favorite LLM to make your own vibe-coded version.I especially like how an offline app has to periodically validate its license through polar.sh who themselves use personal data for advertising & marketing purposes, effectively turning the app into a paid tracking cookie.”
“When we add optional pieces to our Mac app, the useful test is whether the diff stays local or leaks into shared state and startup paths. One real upgrade diff would prove “focused” better than another feature matrix.”
“we're building greypaint, a mac updater for apps and dev tools. paid, 14 day free trial then $6.49 lifetime what it does now: apps plus homebrew, npm, pnpm, uv tools in one window uses the update source each app already has checks every install, same developer and macos accepts it roll back if an update breaks something public page greypaint.app/apps , search any app and see how it updates or that it cant yet 1.3 is out with an all new glass look every feedback and support request gets read”
“Complexity has to play a role, google chrome has more LOC than windows XP... At this point everything is a pile of piles of shit built on top of a gigantic pile of shit.Today I ran out of ram, the "teams" desktop app was taking 2 gigs just standing there doing nothing, you can run four whole windows Xp on the same amount of ram, comfortably. My inactive chatgpt chrome tab alone was taking 900mb”
“Looks like a very nice tool, I do like the animation of it as well. For Apps I use the built-in Windows+M & Shift+Windows+M. For the folders, I do the following: Right-click an empty space on my desktop. Hover over View . Click Show desktop icons to uncheck it. To bring them back, just repeat the steps and check Show desktop icons again. Do you have a small portable executable that would do this available for free download?”
“Why are you reinventing the wheel? Take some time to learn about what tools already exist to solve your problem. Imagine if every idiot reinvented Microsoft word.”
Try something to bring the ram usage down, like Memory Clean or Shiny
“Ha, WhatsApp leftovers are nasty, glad the CLI dug those out. The Mac app Clean pass also looks for leftovers, though depth still depends on which folders you grant. If you try Analyze or Clean on the same Library areas later, I would love to hear whether it catches the same stuff or misses a path.”
“of course its another mac cleaner app. Hazel has been doing this for like 15 years, you write rules in it and it sorts everything before you even look at it, and it costs less than a takeout meal. Also the name. Declutr. Why does every single app drop the e now, is the vowel behind a paywall? Declutter is a word that already exists and nobody is going to sue you for using it. And the screenshot, your app has a Clean button and a Back button and a Continue button, thats three buttons to move file”
“I'm Tw93. About a year ago I wrote a small Mac cleaner for the terminal and put it on GitHub mostly for myself. Mole CLI grew past 60K stars, and the emails kept saying the same thing: my parents use a Mac, my sister too, neither will open a terminal. Can you make something they can click? So I shipped Mole for Mac, a native app that uses the same conservative cleanup rules. The part I care about most is review before delete. You see each path and size, uncertain items stay unchecked, and or”
“Ran it. Two from the last week, both r/MacOS : "using an app like daisy disk shows more storage used than System Settings, 274GBs compared to 181GBs" https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1wbpvtj/mac_storage_calculation/ "trying to delete my spotlight index to free up my onboard storage. Now my Mac is stuck in a boot loop" https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1w57u6y/deleted_spotlight_index_was_trying_to_free_up/ The second one is your "nothing is removed until you”
“I use Mole a lot to clean up my Mac. I wanted something visual where I could click through folders, see what was taking up space, and decide what to delete. So I vibe coded storagedaddy with Codex. I've been using it on my own Mac, finding annoying bits, and going back to fix them. It shows a live storage map and picks out things like build caches, node_modules, packages and .git folders. You add things to a cleanup list, review it, then move them to Trash. Scanning doesn't delete anythi”
“It will use swap and make me force-quit processes to un-freeze even if I had 1TB? Super cool feature!”
I started 10 years with with 8GB RAM and quickly realized it was too little, then upgraded to 16gb. This worked for a while, but then my dev got more advanced (more…
“Hey, saw Nuticast on SideProject — pretty interesting solution to a very specific developer problem.”
“that helps with runtime cost, but it doesn’t fully solve the “small utility became a suite” problem. disabled modules still add decisions to the product and future maintenance, so i’d probably make the default surface brutally narrow and let power users opt into the rest.”
“As dev transitioning from the Windows ecosystem to macOS, I loved many things. The speed, the battery life, how beautiful the apps are. But I definitely did NOT love the Finder. Many things frustrated me about it - from the unintuitive Enter key, the non-functional Delete key, and the lack of Ctrl+X, to the random icon placement and the lack of a familiar look. Of course, I tried to replace it with numerous apps, like Command X, to larger solutions like Commander One and Marta. However, I didn&#”
“Hey everyone, Like many of you, I develop on a Mac, and I constantly found myself running out of disk space. Between Xcode derived data, simulator caches, Docker images, and package manager junk, tens of gigabytes just vanish into thin air. I wanted a fast, native, and completely minimalist tool to reclaim that space without bloated UI or subscription traps. So I built DevCleaner . It specifically targets developer-specific junk that general Mac cleaning apps usually miss or mismanage. 🚀 We are”