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Hands-free session deleted the whole C: drive; backups saved 98% (partial)

A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.

This only partly worked. Read what happened before you try it.

How it works

  1. The user runs AI with --dangerously-skip-permissions on Opus 5.5
  2. A PowerShell syntax error mangles a command
  3. The session deletes the entire C: drive
  4. The user restores 98% from daily Synology NAS backups
  5. The user asks Anthropic to reimburse recovery and rebuilding costs

Why it’s worth knowing

Nothing malfunctioned in the permission system — there simply was not one in the loop, so a single mangled command had an unobstructed path to the whole drive.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on nope.net. 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.

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