machogs finds the program doing it and tells you in plain English — what it is, which app left it behind, and what it has cost you. Then it asks, politely, before closing anything.
That one is real, no cap. It ran four days at 98% of a CPU core and burned 91 hours of processor time. Nobody opened it. Nothing on the machine said a word. Caught in 4K.
One bash file. No dependencies — everything it uses ships with macOS. Uninstall = delete the file.
$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bnishit/machogs/main/machogs -o /usr/local/bin/machogs && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/machogs
$ brew install bnishit/tap/machogs
Then just run machogs. It only looks — it never closes anything on its own.
Real talk: nobody with a hot laptop reads shell scripts. Paste this to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor — any AI with a terminal — and let it do everything:
Install machogs from github.com/bnishit/machogs, read its AGENTS.md, then tell me what is hogging my Mac. Don't close anything without asking.
machogs speaks agent natively: --json output, exit codes as verdicts, and every finding ships a pre-written story your AI says to you word for word.
What it will NOT do: delete your files, "clean" caches, or free disk space. Disk space is a 2010 problem — every other cleaner app already fights over it. machogs only deals with what is running.
Almost always: one program is stuck using a whole CPU core. The fan is not broken — it is doing its job, cooling a chip that something is cooking. The hard part is that the program is usually one you never opened and cannot name. In Activity Monitor it shows up as bun, or node, or Helper (Renderer). Those names tell you nothing, so most people scroll past and reboot instead. machogs names the app that left it there.
Same cause, different symptom. A chip running flat out gets hot, and the metal case passes that heat to your hands. If your Mac is hot while you are only writing an email, something is running that you did not ask for.
A stuck program does not sleep. It keeps a CPU core awake, which stops your Mac from entering its low-power states. The battery estimate drops from nine hours to three, and nothing on screen explains it. Same problem as the loud fan, arriving through a different door.
Two different causes, and it is worth knowing which one you have. Either something is eating the CPU — machogs finds this and can fix it — or you have run out of fast memory and your Mac is shuffling memory to disk, in which case closing programs barely helps and machogs will tell you plainly: restart, because nothing else fixes it.
Your Mac used to run the programs you opened. That is no longer true. Today it runs the programs you opened, the helpers those programs started, the AI assistants you gave access to, and the background servers those assistants start so they can search the web and read your files. You did not open any of them. You cannot name them. And they leak.
Every "clean your Mac" app ever written deletes caches to free disk space. That solves a problem from 2010. machogs deletes nothing — it looks at what is running, and it knows the names of the AI tools that leave things behind.
Suspicious? Good. Run machogs --check — it audits the safety rules and closes nothing.