Codex, Claude, and Cursor were holding 72.6 GB on one Mac. We measured why coding agents eat disk space — 77% images, 39% duplicates — and how to reclaim it without deleting a single conversation.
How this was measured #
Measured with Mint’s own read-only scan hooks on one developer Mac in August 2026. Session files were streamed with pread into a single reused buffer, so reading a 14 GB conversation grew the process by tens of megabytes; resident memory was sampled while it ran and is part of the record. Duplicate screenshots were found by hashing every embedded image; “archive frees nothing” was checked by reading free space before and after the archive step. The scans run entirely on device and you can reproduce them on yours.
source & further reading
mint.dzgapp.com — original article