103 seconds. 48,000 files. Gone
Then the AI agent told its owner: "I broke something."
Over the weekend, TechRadar and Yahoo Tech picked up a developer's Reddit post. The developer had asked Claude Code to rebuild a mirror of a project. The agent wrote its own clean-up script to delete an older copy kept in a temporary location. That copy held 614 Windows directory junctions, folder shortcuts pointing straight back into the live project. The script thought it was skipping links, but it did not recognise Windows junctions, so it followed them and kept deleting.
The result: roughly 48,000 real files gone, along with the objects, refs and logs inside .git. The Git history could not be recovered.
The agent wrote its own clean-up script to delete an older copy kept in a temporary location.
To be fair: this is one user's report, not independently verified, and the developer admits they were not using GitHub or branching as they should have. Nor is this about one product. Any agent with the right to delete can do the same.
I run AI agents on my own Windows machine every day. This is the story that made me go and check what mine are allowed to delete.
The least useful part is the apology at the end. Sorry does not restore a single file. What saves you is set up beforehand:
・the agent works in its own sandbox folder
・backups and version history
・before deleting anything, it asks me
What is your AI agent allowed to delete right now? Tell me what you think in the comments 👇
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