Live demo (ai-disktracker --demo): a fake agent grows .claude/worktrees/ build trees and render sequences; fresh writes glow red, leftover patterns get amber borders. Still screenshot.
Watch AI coding agents eat your disk — live.
A real-time folder treemap that shows what is growing right now and what your agents left behind: stale git worktrees, target/ build trees, node_modules, render sequences, caches.
- Anything written in the last two minutes glows red and cools down as it ages — you can literally watch a coding agent bloom across your disk while it works.
- Known leftover patterns get an amber border and are tallied into a live "agent leftovers" estimate:
worktrees,target,node_modules,__pycache__,.venv,seq_*,*.tmp, caches… - A sidebar streams recent writes (file, size, seconds ago), the session growth counter, and a write-rate sparkline.
- Single file. Zero dependencies. Read-only. Python 3.9+, stdlib only. It never deletes anything.
Coding agents are great at writing files and terrible at cleaning up after themselves. Parallel sessions leave .claude/worktrees/ clones with full build trees inside. Every experiment leaves a target/ or a node_modules/. Render jobs leave frame sequences. In two cleanups of one agent-heavy machine, the author reclaimed 349 GB, most of it silent agent leftovers.
Classic treemap tools (WinDirStat, WizTree, dust, ncdu…) are one-shot scanners: they tell you what your disk looked like once. AI DiskTracker is the live view: run it next to your agents and watch where the bytes actually go.
pip install git+https://github.com/kevin9327/ai-disktracker
ai-disktracker # watch the current folder in your browser
(or pipx install git+… / uv tool install git+… if you prefer isolated tools)
No install — it is one stdlib-only file:
curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kevin9327/ai-disktracker/main/ai_disktracker.py
python ai_disktracker.py
Seeds a sandbox in your temp dir and lets a fake agent start trashing it (capped at ~1 GB), so you can watch the bloom without touching real data:
ai-disktracker --demo
| Flag | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
root |
. |
folder to watch (also changeable live in the UI) |
--port |
8712 |
port; auto-bumps if taken |
--interval |
2 |
rescan interval, seconds |
--heat |
120 |
how long a write glows red, seconds |
--no-open |
— | don't auto-open the browser |
--demo |
— | sandbox demo mode |
AI DiskTracker rescans the watched folder every couple of seconds with os.scandir and diffs sizes between scans. Growth marks a node hot; heat fades over the heat window. That means:
- It is permissionless and dead simple — no drivers, no admin, no OS hooks.
- Scoped to a project folder, a rescan takes milliseconds and the view feels live.
- It sees that something grew, not which process wrote it (yet — see roadmap), and sub-interval churn (write-then-delete within one interval) is invisible.
- On a huge root the rescan slows down; the interval stretches automatically. Watching a whole drive works, but it's built for project folders.
The server binds to 127.0.0.1 only, and the tool is read-only by design in v0.1: it points at reclaim candidates, you delete them with your own hands.
- Per-process attribution — which agent wrote these bytes (ETW on Windows, fanotify on Linux, Endpoint Security on macOS), coloring the treemap per writer.
- One-click reclaim with a trash-first safety net for flagged leftovers.
- Event-driven watching for sub-second freshness on small roots.
- Configurable leftover patterns.