My laptop was sitting idle with the fan at full tilt. Nothing was running that I knew of. The culprit turned out to be ten orphaned busy-loops left behind by a Claude Code session two days earlier.
Just fix it for me
If your fan is roaring right now and you would rather not read the rest, paste this into a Claude Code session:
My machine seems idle but the fan is at full speed. Check the load average against my core count, then list the top CPU consumers with their PPID, elapsed time, and full argument list. I am looking for orphaned processes: anything reparented to PID 1 that has been burning CPU for hours or days, especially shells and interpreters where the process name alone tells you nothing. Show me what you find and what each one actually is before killing anything, and let me confirm the list first.
The "show me before killing" part is the important bit, and it is why the prompt is written that way rather than as "find and kill whatever is using CPU." A long-running process pinned to PID 1 is a strong hint that something was abandoned, but it is not proof. Daemons legitimately live there, and your own nohup'd job or a detached build will look identical from a distance. Read the argument list before you agree to anything. In my case the arguments made it obvious in about two seconds.
