By BuildCraft Labs
Hotfix monitors CPU usage in the background and automatically terminates runaway processes before your fan screams and your battery dies.
The Problem
AI tools, extensions, and daemons increasingly consume 50–100% CPU for hours — silently.
Claude, Copilot, and other AI extensions can spawn Python or Node processes that loop forever, burning CPU with no indication anything is wrong.
Your fan spins up and won't stop. The system stays hot. Thermal throttling kicks in. Everything slows down — all because of one rogue process.
Sustained high CPU usage can cut battery life in half. Processes that should idle are instead burning through your charge in the background.
When a CPU hog runs unchecked, your laptop's underside heats up. If it's sitting on your lap, that heat goes places it probably shouldn't. Hotfix keeps your processor — and your legacy — cool.
How It Works
Hotfix runs silently in your system tray and handles everything without interrupting your work.
Hotfix polls all running processes every 5 seconds, tracking CPU usage per process over time.
When a process sustains CPU usage above your threshold for longer than your configured duration, it gets flagged.
The offending process is terminated. You get a notification. Your fan slows down. Done.
Adoption
Live counts, straight from GitHub Releases.
Features
Set it once and forget it — Hotfix stays out of your way until something runs hot.
Choose the CPU threshold and how long a process must stay hot before Hotfix steps in.
System-critical processes are permanently protected, and you can whitelist anything you want left alone.
Optionally clear out hot processes whenever your machine goes to sleep.
A native notification fires the moment a process is terminated — nothing happens behind your back.
New versions download, install, and relaunch in the background — no prompts, no interruptions.
If Hotfix ever crashes, it opens a pre-filled GitHub issue on the next launch for you to review and send.
FAQ
Everything people ask before installing Hotfix.
Hotfix is a free, native system-tray app for macOS and Windows that monitors CPU usage and automatically terminates runaway processes before your fan spins up, your machine overheats, or your battery drains.
Yes. Hotfix is completely free and open source. There is no subscription, no account, and no telemetry.
Hotfix runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later (Apple Silicon and Intel) and on Windows 11 (64-bit).
Hotfix checks every running process every 5 seconds. When a process stays above your chosen CPU threshold for longer than your chosen duration, Hotfix terminates it and shows a notification. You control both the threshold and the duration.
No. Critical system processes such as kernel_task, WindowServer and Finder are permanently excluded and can never be terminated, and you can add your own trusted apps to a whitelist.
No. Hotfix has no telemetry and no account. It runs entirely on your machine; the only network request it makes is checking GitHub for new versions so it can update itself silently.
Download
Native app for both platforms. No subscription, no account, no telemetry.
macOS: right-click → Open on first launch (not yet notarized). Windows: a per-user installer — no admin needed; the app self-updates silently after that.