A customer with ~50 active Swift, Rust and Node projects on a 256GB Mac told me the archive feature was useless for him. His projects aren't old, they're just huge.
So 1.15.0 adds Project Artifacts: DevCleaner now finds target/, .build/ and node_modules inside projects you're actively working on, shows the size per project, and lets you clean just the regenerable output. Your source never gets touched.
Also new:
Auto Clean (opt-in) that keeps build output in check on a schedule
Archive now moves to Trash instead of deleting
Fixed the excluded-folder dialog
An explanation for why free space sometimes lags after a clean (Time Machine local snapshots)
Wow, I had no idea AI apps were hoarding that much space! Cursor and Ollama have definitely been eating up my disk. Super timely tool, congrats on launching....
@vikramp7470 Thank you! Cursor is sneaky - it keeps a local index of your entire codebase that can balloon to gigabytes over time. And Ollama is the worst offender: a single model is 2–40 GB, and it never garbage-collects the ones you stopped using. That was actually the trigger for building DevCleaner - I opened Finder one day and just saw a huge ~/.ollama/models folder staring back at me. 😅
This is super useful, as a software engineer (and a vibe coder :P) i'm ramping up so much GBs that sometimes my top tier macos pro even hangs and asks me to free up space, turns out alot of these GBs are build artifacts! thanks OP, upvoted.
@therayess Ha, "vibe coder" — love it. And yes, build artifacts are the silent killers. DerivedData alone can quietly eat 50–100 GB without ever asking permission. The really fun part is that macOS's "free up space" suggestion will never point you at ~/Library/Developer — so most people don't even know it's there until they run du -sh ~/Library/Developer and have a small crisis. 😅 Thanks for the upvote, really appreciate it on launch day!
Every dev laptop eventually becomes a landfill with a keyboard. Love the idea of cleaning hidden GBs without me playing detective.
@sarveshsea Landfill with a keyboard" is the most accurate description of my machine pre-DevCleaner that I've ever read. Stealing that for the README. 😄 Thanks for the upvote!
Fantastic job! I didn't know about this problem until I've try it. And its HUGE. Thank you that you built DevCleaner!
@honza_vomacka This is exactly the reaction that makes building something worth it — you don't know the problem exists until you see the number. Glad it helped! 🙏