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AI coding assistant caches on Windows: Claude, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf and Antigravity

By Bhavik · Sources checked September 29, 2026

Why AI coding tools take up more space than you would expect

Most AI coding assistants on Windows are built on Electron or a similar Chromium-based shell, and separately download runtime binaries and editor plugins. That means on top of the application itself, each tool keeps a web cache and code cache from its embedded browser, a GPU cache for rendering, a plugin cache for anything it has downloaded, and in some cases a runtime cache for the CLI itself. None of this is visible from Windows' own Storage settings, since it is grouped under generic app data rather than broken out per tool.

What SpaceFree finds

SpaceFree's Developer storage section now has a dedicated AI Coding Assistants view that scans for cache data from Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Windsurf and Google Antigravity, with GitHub Copilot support marked as coming soon. On a typical development machine this turns up entries such as:

  • Codex CLI Plugin Cache and Codex CLI Runtime Cache
  • Claude Desktop Web Cache, Code Cache and GPU Cache
  • Claude Code Plugin Cache
  • Google Antigravity Web Cache
  • GitHub Copilot Chat Storage

In an internal test run, those caches added up to 790.2MB across 8 items on a single machine, with the largest single entry (a Codex CLI plugin cache) accounting for over 400MB on its own.

What gets cleared, and what never does

The scanner only targets data each tool can rebuild on its own: web and code caches, GPU caches, downloaded plugins and runtime caches. Every item it lists shows when it was last used and how it gets rebuilt, so nothing is removed as a guess.

Conversations, sessions and history are never scanned or touched by this feature. That data is locked out entirely, not just left unchecked by default.

How to check your own machine

Open SpaceFree, go to Developer storage, then AI Coding Assistants. It lists every cache found per tool, with the total size, the largest single cache, and a last-used timestamp for each entry. Purging moves the selected caches to the Recycle Bin and logs the action to history, so a purge can be undone if a tool needs to rebuild something sooner than expected. Download SpaceFree.

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