I built BurnZombies to clean up after long coding-agent sessions on macOS

Skylar Graika — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 18:39:40 +0000

Finishing a coding task can leave a surprising amount behind: browser helpers, build watchers, installed dependencies and another checkout full of generated files.

I’m building BurnZombies to handle that recurring cleanup from the Mac menu bar.

The difficult part is determining whether something is still useful. A quiet process may belong to another task. A worktree that hasn’t changed recently may hold unpublished work.

BurnZombies inventories resources across sessions, applies cleanup rules and rechecks actions in native code. It uses graceful termination for eligible processes and verifies a restore point before removing an eligible worktree.

There are automatic starter rules you can disable. For other patterns, the app asks a yes/no question. Those answers apply to future matches too, and the learned rules are visible in Settings.

Claude Code and Codex can optionally help review new findings. The reviewer has a bounded tool interface, while the native app checks cleanup actions. Scanning and native rules work without AI; model reviews use your existing harness account and allowance.

The app records what cleanup actually recovered. That gives you something concrete to inspect as you decide which rules to keep.

It’s free, MIT licensed and currently supports macOS 14+.

Source, screenshots and installation

If you run coding agents for long stretches, I’d like to hear about the leftovers your current workflow misses.

DEV Community: Skylar Graika

I built BurnZombies to clean up after long coding-agent sessions on macOS