I built Yokoi, a native macOS cleaner made just for that mess. The first time I ran it on my own Mac, it cleaned 196GB. Now auto-clean quietly clears another 9-10GB a week on average, and I don't think about it.
Since it deletes things for a living, I made it paranoid. Everything goes to the Trash first, you can hit Put Back to undo, and it won't touch projects or apps that are in use. It never runs sudo.
Now I need your help: what should it clean next? Is there a tool hogging your disk that Yokoi misses, or a feature you wish it had? Drop it in the comments, thanks!
I work on a MacBook Pro with 512 GB of storage. For most people that's plenty. For me, it was full every couple of weeks.
I spend my days spinning up AI proofs of concept and MVPs and doing model research. Every experiment leaves something behind: a fresh `node_modules`, a Python virtual environment, a build folder, a few gigabytes of model weights pulled from Hugging Face or Ollama, Docker images I used once. Multiply that by dozens of projects and the disk disappears quietly, until macOS tells you there's no room left to save a file.
Traditional cleaners weren't cutting it. They're built to clear browser caches, images, docs and log files. They don't know what a `target/` folder is, that DerivedData can be rebuilt, or which of my 40 `node_modules` folders belong to projects I haven't touched in months.
So I cleaned by hand. I'd open Ghostty and run the same ritual over and over: `du -sh * | sort -h` to find the culprits, then `rm -rf` on node_modules, `brew cleanup`, `docker system prune`, digging through `~/.cache/huggingface`. It worked, but it was slow, I had to remember every tool's hiding spot, and one wrong `rm -rf` could take something I needed with it.
I've been a developer for about 30 years now. Spent most of that time buried in financial algorithms, trading systems, and enough lines of code to make a normal person question my sanity.
