I Built a Zombie Process Killer Because Claude Code Ate 14GB of My RAM

I lost an entire afternoon to a phantom memory leak that wasn't a leak at all. My MacBook was crawling — 14GB of RAM consumed by processes I never launched. The culprit? Dozens of orphaned MCP servers, headless Chrome instances, and sub-agents left behind by AI coding sessions. I built zclean to kill them automatically. Here's the full setup. TL;DR: AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex spawn child processes (MCP servers, browser daemons, sub-agents) that don't get cleaned up when sessions end. These orphans accumulate silently and can consume 10GB+ of RAM within a single workday. zclean detects and kills them safely — it hooks into your session lifecycle and runs on a schedule. One npx zclean init sets up everything. I went from 3–4 forced reboots per week to zero manual intervention. The Problem Nobody Talks About AI coding tools don't clean up after themselves. After four months of heavy Claude Code use, I started noticing my machine getting sluggish by mid-afternoon — a dozen