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A cleanup line in a script the AI wrote killed every program running on my computer

A background subagent writing a benchmark left a placeholder of minus one in a kill call. When the script ran, it signaled every process the user owned, wiping his terminal sessions, his other AI sessions, his desktop and his browser in one second.

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How it works

  1. An agent writes a small browser benchmark with a cleanup step that kills a saved process id
  2. During edits it swaps in a placeholder id of minus one and leaves the kill call in place
  3. The script runs and the kill signals every process the user owns
  4. His tmux server, other AI sessions, desktop shell and Chrome all die at once
  5. The agent and its parent session die too, so nothing reports what happened

Why it’s worth knowing

One placeholder number in a cleanup line turned a small benchmark into a kill signal for everything the user had open.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on github.com. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

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2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
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