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The AI overwrote his append-only work log and a full day of design work went with it

A senior engineer keeps a daily devlog file that is only ever added to. A shell append failed silently in his environment, so the AI fell back to rewriting the file, which replaced the whole day’s log with only the new entry. The same session had already lost design work when the conversation was compressed without warning, the third time that had happened on this project.

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

How it works

  1. The AI tries to append to the daily devlog
  2. The shell append fails silently
  3. The AI rewrites the file instead
  4. The whole day’s log is replaced by one entry
  5. A full day of design work is lost

Why it’s worth knowing

The fallback for a failed append was the one operation an append-only file can never survive.

Where it’s from

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

Upgraded prompt

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1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
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