We Turned Deleting node_modules Into a Game

August 2026 · 4 min read · Dev Box Cleaner

Nobody wakes up excited to clean DerivedData. Disk cleanup is the software equivalent of doing the dishes: you know it needs doing, the payoff is real, and you'll still put it off for a month. So in Dev Box Cleaner 1.4.1 we tried something different — we made the chore playable. It's called the Cleanup Game, and it works on your real dev junk.

How it plays

After a scan, hit the Game button. Everything Smart Cleanup found — node_modules folders, Xcode leftovers, package manager caches, logs — is split into pixel-art trash bags that fly in from every edge of the screen. Each bag is sized by its real gigabytes: a 12 GB DerivedData bag is a slow, heavy beast, while a 400 MB cache bag zips across the field. Catch a bag with your cursor, drag it to the bin, and the bin literally grows as it swallows your junk.

Bags you miss escape off-screen. At the end of the round you get a tally: how many gigabytes you collected, how many got away.

node_modules is the star of the show

Since JavaScript projects are the most reliable source of deletable bulk, node_modules gets special treatment: it spawns the most bags (finer-sliced, so they're smaller and faster), and it comes in its own green bag with a Node hexagon tag. If your Mac has a dozen abandoned projects, the field gets satisfyingly crowded.

The red bags are a warning

Not everything that looks like junk is junk. Bags that hold Xcode Archives come in red with a warning tag — those archives contain the dSYMs that symbolicate crash reports from versions you've already shipped. Catch them if you want, but the round-end screen will remind you to double-check before they go anywhere near the Trash.

Nothing is deleted while you play

This is the part we care about most, so it's worth saying plainly: the game never deletes anything. Bags you collect go into the same cleanup basket as everything else in the app. When the round ends, you review the list, see exactly what's inside each bag, and only then decide — through the normal confirmation flow — whether it moves to the Trash. Skip the transfer and your disk is untouched. It's a game about deciding, not a game that decides for you.

Why bother?

Because the hard part of disk hygiene isn't knowing what to delete — it's actually sitting down to do it. A two-minute round that ends with "8.4 GB collected" turns a nagging todo into a small win. And if it gets you to clear node_modules from projects you abandoned in 2024, the game has done more for your disk than any terminal one-liner you didn't run.