CleanMyMac

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Do not build this — and be careful with the category, because the failure mode is deleting something that mattered.

What is being sold is a list: which caches are safe to clear, which files each application leaves behind, and which of them can go. That list is maintained by people watching many machines, and being wrong about one entry means somebody's licence file, mail archive or project cache is gone.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
- **Most of what this finds, the system already tells you.** macOS has storage management built in, and it names the large files, the old downloads and the applications you have not opened
- `du` and `ncdu` in a terminal answer 'what is filling the disk' in ten seconds and cost nothing
- For an uninstall, AppCleaner is free and does exactly the leftover-finding part

WHAT YOU CAN BUILD, AND SHOULD

**A disk report, which reports and never deletes:**
- Walk the disk, record every path with its size, modified date and hash of the first block
- Rank directories by size, and files not opened in a long time
- Find duplicates by hash — but **show them and never act.** Two identical files are often two on purpose: a backup, a submodule, a build artefact
- Track growth over time by storing a nightly snapshot of directory sizes, which is what actually tells you what is filling the disk rather than what is merely big
- That is a script, it is an afternoon, and it is genuinely useful

**THE RULE, IF YOU BUILD ANYTHING THAT DELETES**
- Never delete. Move to a staging directory with a manifest of where everything came from, and delete that after a stated period
- Print what would happen before doing it, and require a deliberate confirmation
- Never touch a path you do not have a positive reason for. A block-list of dangerous paths is a game you lose; an allow-list of paths you understand is the only safe shape
- Caches are not free to clear: the next build or the next application launch pays for it. Clearing a cache to reclaim a gigabyte on a terabyte disk is a bad trade

WHAT NOT TO BELIEVE
- 'Cleaning' does not make a modern machine faster. Free disk space matters below a threshold and not above it, and clearing caches makes things slower until they are rebuilt
- If a Mac is slow, the answer is usually memory pressure or a runaway process, both of which the built-in activity monitor shows for nothing

THE ONE-LINE VERSION
Use the built-in storage tool and ncdu. If you build something, make it report and never delete — and remember that a cache cleared is a cost deferred, not a saving.