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Free disk space on a developer Mac:
the 10 biggest wins

CacheCleaner guides · ranked by typical gigabytes recovered

Skip the generic advice about emptying the Trash. On a dev machine the space is in tool caches – here's the top 10 by real payout, each with the command or the guide.
  1. Xcode device support symbols – 2-5 GB per OS version of every device you plugged in. Delete old versions in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport. Guide →
  2. Docker / OrbStack VM – 30-100 GB. docker system prune -a + builder prune. Guide →
  3. Simulator runtimes – 5-8 GB each, all versions kept. xcrun simctl runtime list / delete. Guide →
  4. DerivedData – 10-50 GB. rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData. Guide →
  5. Time Machine local snapshots – the reason deleting files freed nothing. tmutil deletelocalsnapshots. Guide →
  6. AI models – Hugging Face, Ollama, LM Studio; 100+ GB if you experiment. Guide →
  7. Project build folders – node_modules, Rust target, Gradle builds across every repo you ever cloned. node_modules → Rust →
  8. iOS device backups – tens of GB per device in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync. Guide →
  9. Package manager caches – npm, pip, cargo, brew, gradle, cocoapods; a few GB each, a lot together. brew → Python → Gradle →
  10. IDE & app caches – VS Code, JetBrains, Slack, Discord, browsers. IDEs → Electron apps →

Or do all ten in one pass: CacheCleaner scans every location on this list, shows real sizes, pre-selects only the safe items and marks the risky ones with ⚠️.

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