My MacBook had been crawling for days. Apps took forever to open, switching between windows felt like wading through mud, and I had no idea why. I only had 4 browser tabs open — nothing unusual. Then I tried Kiro CLI, and within minutes I had my answer and my fix.
Here's exactly how it went down.
The Problem
Everything was slow. Not "a little laggy" slow — genuinely unusable slow. Spinning beach balls, delayed keystrokes, the works. I'd already tried the usual suspects: restarting apps, clearing cache, the classic "turn it off and on again." Nothing helped.
Installing Kiro CLI
Getting started took less than a minute. Kiro CLI is a terminal-based AI assistant that can interact directly with your system.
brew install kiro-cliThen just launch it:
kiro-cli chatThat's it. No complex setup, no config files to edit.
Identifying the Issue
I typed one line to Kiro:
"my system is very slow"
Kiro immediately ran a system diagnostic and surfaced this:
Load Avg: 19.14, 69.88, 67.35
PhysMem: 7489M used, 142M unused
VM: 384609609 swapins, 394054546 swapoutsKiro's analysis was direct: load average of 19 is dangerously high (healthy is 1–4), RAM was nearly exhausted, and the system was thrashing swap — reading and writing to disk constantly, which is orders of magnitude slower than RAM.
It also spotted the likely culprit immediately: 136 Chrome Helper processes running simultaneously.
I pushed back — I only had 4 tabs open. Kiro dug deeper and found something I hadn't considered:
"There are two user accounts running Chrome — your active session and a background session via Fast User Switching. Chrome is running in both."
That was the "aha" moment. I'd switched users earlier and never logged out. The other account had Chrome fully running in the background, invisible to me.
Fixing the Root Cause
Kiro walked me through the fix step by step.
First attempt — a clean kill signal:
sudo pkill -u [other-user] "Google Chrome"That reduced Chrome processes from 136 to 55, but didn't finish the job. Kiro checked again and found 39 processes still running under the background account. So it gave me a harder fix:
sudo kill -9 $(ps aux | grep -i "Google Chrome" | grep [other-user] | awk '{print $2}' | tr '\n' ' ')After that, Kiro ran another check:
Load Avg: 2.49
CPU idle: 83%
Chrome processes: 19 (normal — just my active session)Done. System restored.
How Kiro CLI Saved My Day
What would have taken me an hour of Googling, Stack Overflow rabbit holes, and trial-and-error took about 10 minutes of conversation. Kiro didn't just tell me "Chrome uses a lot of memory" — it:
- Ran live diagnostics on my system
- Identified the non-obvious root cause (Fast User Switching + dual Chrome sessions)
- Gave me the exact commands to fix it
- Verified the fix actually worked after each step
It felt less like using a tool and more like having a sysadmin sitting next to me.
Try Kiro CLI for Free
Kiro offers a 500-credit free trial when you sign up — more than enough to explore what it can do. After the trial, there's a free tier to keep using it, with paid plans starting at $20/month if you need more capacity.
👉 kiro.dev
If your Mac (or any system) ever feels inexplicably slow, just open a terminal and ask. You might be surprised how fast you get an answer.
Content was rephrased for compliance with licensing restrictions.
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