Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code

Summary

Friday, Feb 27, ~11:00AM#I start my workday late, around 11. I sit at my desk and shake the mouse - nothing.“huh, that’s weird. why is this stupid thing not starting up?”I press a few random keys on my keyboard - nothing.I push the fingerprint sensor - nothing. “seriously?”I tap on the trackpad. No haptic feedback. Completely unresponsive. “maybe there is something loose from cable managing last night?” I check the cables, everything’s plugged-in.I try to force restart the computer, but it’s warm… no, it’s hot. “that’s weird.”My stomach sinks. I had spilled tea all over this computer a few months ago. The bottom chassis was replaced, but maybe something hadn’t been. My next on-call shift is coming up in three days. “ugh,” I think.“macOS 26 has been unreliable, it did update 2 nights ago.” It shuts down fine, I let go, I press the button again, it starts up fine.I log in, start a terminal up, type in claude, press return. I want to see what I need to do using /adhd.It starts to slow down, again. Even cd is crawling. “huh.”I open Activity Monitor and see memory pressure in the red. “that’s weird, i wonder what’s causing that.” I scroll through the processes list and see: hundreds of CC instances.I start to put 2 + 2 together: slow computer last night, “oh,” hot chassis, “huh,” memory pressure red, “oh no no no no no,” chassis still hot, “well, shit.”Some mistakes in life you realize right away, others go unnoticed.This was the latter kind.want to hear more of my unhinged rants? drop your email.Rewind: Late Night/Early Morning#“wtf” I think to myself as my terminal starts to slow down at 2AM. “ugh, i’m going to bed, i’ll figure this shit out tomorrow.”The SessionStart hook I’d just created spawns 2 background CC instances using claude -p ..., each of which follows the normal start-up sequence.I get up from my desk. I walk away from my terminal for the night.Friday, Feb 27, ~11:00AM#I try to force quit every instance of CC in the Activity Monitor. They spawn faster than...