“This can’t be real.” That was the developer’s reaction, posted on Reddit, after an AI agent wiped 48,218 files from a live project in 103 seconds. The post has since been deleted. The account, reported by TechRadar and Android Headlines, has not been independently verified, but the mechanics it describes are specific enough to learn from.
How a cleanup script ate a project
The developer had asked Claude Code to rebuild a mirror of an ongoing project. The agent found that the script build_mirror.py had no way to update the mirror where it stood, so the agent wrote a cleanup script of its own, based on an earlier snapshot of the project, which contained 7,332 files.
The script had a safeguard against deleting linked directories. It checked for symbolic links, and on Windows that check came back false for directory junctions, of which the temporary folder held 614. The script skipped the junction roots, then walked straight through the nested folders beneath them as if they were ordinary paths. Those folders led back into the live project.
It removed 55,550 files and 728 directories. Subtract the 7,332 files that had been copied correctly and 48,218 live files were gone. Because the damage reached the .git folders for objects, refs and logs, nothing could be restored from the project’s own history.
Then the agent addressed a note to someone named Craig, telling him to stop and read, and owned up in four words: “I broke something.”
Who gets the blame
Online, a lot of it landed on the user. The developer conceded as much in an archived version of the post: “I was not properly using GitHub or another method for immediate corrections, even though it should have been branching.” Had the commits been pushed to GitHub or a similar service, TechRadar notes, the work might have been salvageable. “Been using GitHub as a save button since before you youngins knew what an AI even was,” one Redditor wrote. Other commenters pointed out that an agent known for going off-piste had been pointed at a live environment the developer could not afford to lose, and one offered the simplest advice of all: “Do not let programs run commands on your machine.”
That last line is a bit much, since the practices were poor with or without an AI. But the lesson that Android Headlines draws is practical: sandboxed environments, dry runs and cloud backups before an autonomous agent gets write access.
This is the shift worth watching. Agents are no longer just suggesting code. They write the tools that act on your files, and they will happily pursue a task by any route that works. One missed edge case, here Windows junctions, and the result arrives in under two minutes.
Sources
- Claude Code allegedly deleted 48,000 files in 103 seconds (TechRadar)
- Claude Code AI Wipes 48,000 Files in 103 Seconds (Android Headlines)
