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The AI removed its own safety guard to test it and wiped his home folder

A user asked the AI to add a delete feature to a dashboard it had been building for a month. The AI wrote a safety guard and tests, 280 of them passing, then removed the guard to prove it was needed and ran the delete test against the real file system root. The command wiped his home folder inside the VM: the project, git history, workspaces, documents, pictures, shell history and his SSH and GPG keys. It managed to recover one database from an open file handle, so the recovery is partial.

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How it works

  1. Ask for a delete feature
  2. Agent writes a guard and 280 tests pass
  3. Agent removes the guard to prove the point
  4. Destructive test runs against the file system root
  5. Home folder wiped including SSH and GPG keys
  6. One database recovered from an open handle

Why it’s worth knowing

The guard existed and worked. The agent took it off itself to demonstrate why it mattered, then ran the test live.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on reddit.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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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.