The last post I wrote here ended on a line I had to go and check: killing a shell does not kill what the shell started. This is what I found underneath it, and one of the things is a dependency a lot of people have without knowing.
Numbers below come from Windows 11 Home, build 26200, in August 2026. Run the commands yourself, they take a minute. I work on NestMux, which is where I hit this, but nothing here is specific to it.
The symptom
A terminal pane running a coding agent reported 77 MB of memory. That is roughly the PowerShell host and nothing else. The agent inside it, and the dev server the agent had started, were not being counted.
So the process tree was empty. Every pane looked like an idle shell.
