Why AI Coding Tools Eat Your RAM (And How to Fix It)

Your AI coding tool isnt slow Your machine is drowning in zombie processes The Problem If you use Claude Code Codex or similar AI coding assistants youve probably noticed your machine getting slower over time RAM usage creeping up Fans spinning Eventually a force restart Most people blame the AI tool But the real culprit is usually orphaned child processes Every time you start a Claude Code session it spawns child processes MCP servers for tool integrations Notion Supabase Playwright etc Sub agents for parallel task execution Headless browsers for web browsing and testing Build tools like esbuild vite webpack in watch mode When the session ends especially on crash or force quit these children dont always exit They become orphans Still running Still consuming RAM How Bad Is It I discovered this the hard way My MacBook Pro 32GB RAM ground to a halt Load Average 230 normal is 4 8 RAM 31GB used 99MB free Swap 145GB of disk thrashing CPU 99 all kernel task trying to manage the memory crisis