Modern lingo like this seems so unthoughtful to me. I am not old by any metric, but I feel so separated when I read things like this. I wanted to call it stupid but I suppose it's more pleasing to 15 to 20 year olds?

"Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" aren't there just because Microsoft has an inability to pick snappy names.

I tried looking for what made the LLM generate a command to wipe the guy's D drive, but the space problem seems to be what the LLM concluded so that's basically meaningless. The guy is asking leading questions so of course the LLM is going to find some kind of fault, whether it's correct or not, the LLM wants to be rewarded for complying with the user's prompt.

Without the transcription of the actual delete event (rather than an LLM recapping its own output) we'll probably never know for sure what step made the LLM purge the guy's files.

Looking at the comments and prompts, it looks like running "npm start dev" was too complicated a step for him. With that little command line experience, a catastrophic failure like this was inevitable, but I'm surprised how far he got with his vibe coded app before it all collapsed.

Except the folder name did not start with a space. In an unquoted D:\Hello World, the command would match D:\Hello, not D:\ and D:\Hello would not delete the entire drive. How does AI even handle filepaths? Does it have a way to keep track of data that doesn't match a token or is it splitting the path into tokens and throwing everything unknown away?

Chrome's Dev Tool (Network)'s "copy curl command (cmd)" did (does?) this.

There is bunch of VS Code bug is also related to this (e.g. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/248435, still not fixed)

It's also funny because VS Code is a Microsoft product.

I thought cursor (and probably most other) AI IDEs have this capability too? (source: I see cursor executing code via command line frequently in my day to day work).

I've always assumed the protection against this type of mishap is statistical improbability - i.e. it's not impossible for Cursor to delete your project/hard disk, it's just statistically improbable unless the prompt was unfortunately worded to coincidentally have a double meaning (with the second, unintended interpretation being a harmful/irreversible) or the IDE simply makes a mistake that leads to disaster, which is also possible but sufficiently improbable to justify the risk.

This is a Google we've never seen before.

More like the equivalent of "rm -rf --no-preserve-root".

This is a rare example of where the Linux (it's not Unix and almost no-one uses Unix anymore) command is more cautious than the Windows one, whereas it's usually the Linux commands that just do exactly what you specify even if it's stupid.

It’s a similar reason why they can never be trusted to handle user input.

They are probabilistic generators and have no real delineation between system instructions and user input.

It’s like I wrote a JavaScript function where I concatenated the function parameters together with the function body, passed it to eval() and said YOLO.

The amount of stupid things I've done, especially early on in programming, because tech-companies, thought-leaders etc suggested they where not stupid, is much large than I'd admit.

Maybe AI providers should give more warnings and don’t falsely advertise capabilities and safety of their model, but it should be pretty common knowledge at this point that despite marketing claims the models are far from being able to be autonomous and need heavy guidance and review in their usage.

While using the vibe coding tools it became clear to me that this is not something to be used by folks who are not technically inclined. Because at some point they might need to learn about context, tokens etc.

I mean this guy had a single window, 10k lines of code and just kept burning tokens for simplest, vague prompts. This whole issue might be made possible due to Antigravity free tokens. On Cursor the model might have just stopped and asked to fed with more money to start working again -- and then deleting all the files.

Note how OP is very nonchalant at all the responses, mostly just agreeing or mirroring the comments.

I often see it used for astroturfing.

rm -rf / happened so infrequently it makes one wonder why —preserve-root was added in 2003 and made the default in 2006

And just remember, someone will write the usual comment: “AI adds nothing new, this was always the case”

This isn't clarity, that would be stating that it can delete your whole drive without any confirmation in big red letters

> I am looking at the logs from a previous step and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am so deeply, deeply sorry.

[0] 4m20s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpBK1vYAVlA&t=4m20s