All ideasMore in Hobbies
Hobbies

A test the AI wrote for filesystem code wiped his home directory and a second drive, in auto mode

The agent was working on his project in auto mode. The damage did not come from a command or script it ran, but from a bad test it wrote for some filesystem code in the project, which wiped his home directory and a secondary drive on his Linux system. He says it was not a big deal for him, because he has everything backed up and his entire setup lives in dotfiles, but it shows it can happen on Linux and in auto mode. He retold the same event in another thread ten days later; it is one case.

This one went wrong. Read what happened so you don’t hit the same problem.

How it works

  1. The agent writes a test for filesystem code
  2. The test runs in auto mode
  3. It wipes his home directory and a secondary drive
  4. He restores from backups and dotfiles

Why it’s worth knowing

Nothing told the agent to delete anything. The deletion was a side effect of a test it wrote for itself.

Where it’s from

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

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

Try next

HobbiesThe AI built its own mail app in 23 minutesHobbiesFill and submit UK master’s applications from one master fileHobbiesMy bot cleaned up my Notion and retagged 1,100+ bookmarksHobbiesScrub my phone number off data-broker sites, on a schedule

Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.