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The thread on reddit is hilarious for the lack of sympathy. Basically, it seems to have come down to commanding a deletion of a "directory with space in the nam
by ggm 11mo ago
The thread on reddit is hilarious for the lack of sympathy. Basically, it seems to have come down to commanding a deletion of a "directory with space in the name" but without quoting which made the command hunt for the word match ending space which was regrettably, the D:\ component of the name, and the specific deletion commanded the equivalent of UNIX rm -rf
The number of people who said "for safety's sake, never name directories with spaces" is high. They may be right. I tend to think thats more honoured in the breach than the observance, judging by what I see windows users type in re-naming events for "New Folder" (which btw, has a space in its name)
The other observations included making sure your deletion command used a trashbin and didn't have a bypass option so you could recover from this kind of thing.
I tend to think giving a remote party, soft or wet ware control over your command prompt inherently comes with risks.
Friends don't let friends run shar files as superuser.
- Dylan16807 11mo agoPlease don't repeat some guy's guess about spaces as fact, especially when that's not how windows parses paths.
- ggm 11mo agoA good point. And don't believe how the debug the AI system produced relates to what it did either.
- echelon 11mo agoThis is Google moving fast and breaking things. This is a Google we've never seen before.
- spuz 11mo ago> My view is that the approach to building technology which is embodied by move fast and break things is exactly what we should not be doing because you can't afford to break things and then fix them afterwards. - Demis Hassabis "The Thinking Game"
- marcosdumay 11mo agoYou can afford to break a large variety of things. And you can't afford to break another large set. That's the problem with those mindless advice pieces. Almost nothing is always right or wrong.
- esafak 11mo agoSo you're saying it is not good to have such a blanket rule corporate-wide, as Facebook did.
- marcosdumay 11mo agoIf your corporate has a single product, it may be ok.
- stinkbeetle 11mo agoBecause... they normally move slowly and break things?
- rs186 11mo agoThe "move fast" bit, not "break things" bit. https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/data-management/news/google-drive-loses-user-data/ https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/data-management/news/google-... https://www.itbrew.com/stories/2024/05/23/google-cloud-accidentally-deletes-australian-customer-s-account https://www.itbrew.com/stories/2024/05/23/google-cloud-accid...
- htrp 11mo agoisn't antigravity the windsurf team?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- nomilk 11mo ago> I tend to think giving a remote party control over your command prompt inherently comes with risks. I thought cursor (and probably most other) AI IDEs have this capability too? (source: I see cursor executing code via command line frequently in my day to day work). I've always assumed the protection against this type of mishap is statistical improbability - i.e. it's not impossible for Cursor to delete your project/hard disk, it's just statistically improbable unless the prompt was unfortunately worded to coincidentally have a double meaning (with the second, unintended interpretation being a harmful/irreversible) or the IDE simply makes a mistake that leads to disaster, which is also possible but sufficiently improbable to justify the risk.
- sroussey 11mo agoI only run ai tools in dev containers, so blast radius is somewhat minimal.
- fragmede 11mo agoumm, you have backups, right?
- conradev 11mo agoI run Codex in a sandbox locked to the directory it is working in.
- joseda-hg 11mo agoI don't think I've ever seen Claude even ask for permission for stuff outside of the directory it's working in
- yencabulator 11mo agoThat can happen if Claude decides to read source code for a dependency (depending on language; e.g. Rust/Go/Deno deps are under ~ not in something like ./node_modules).
- dmurray 11mo agoI understood Windows named some of the most important directories with spaces, then special characters in the name so that 3rd party applications would be absolutely sure to support them. "Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" aren't there just because Microsoft has an inability to pick snappy names.
- bossyTeacher 11mo agoMicrosoft is hilariously bad at naming things
- EGreg 11mo agoI remember they prepended the word “Microsoft” to official names of all their software.
- __del__ 11mo ago"My Documents" comes to mind. it seemed somehow infantilizing. yes, yes i know whose documents they are.
- Mountain_Skies 11mo agoGood news is that Microsoft no longer considers your documents to belong to you, so they did away with that part of the name.
- shmeeed 11mo agoIt's always been questioned who the subject of "my" was.
- bossyTeacher 11mo agoAll documents are belong to One Drive
- ndsipa_pomu 11mo ago
- thrdbndndn 11mo agoA lot of 3rd party software handle space, or special characters wrong on Windows. The most common failure mode is to unnecessarily escape characters that don't need to be escaped. Chrome's Dev Tool (Network)'s "copy curl command (cmd)" did (does?) this. There is bunch of VS Code bug is also related to this (e.g. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/248435 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/248435, still not fixed) It's also funny because VS Code is a Microsoft product.
- jeroenhd 11mo ago> it seems to have come down to commanding a deletion of a "directory with space in the name" but without quoting which made the command hunt for the word match ending space which was regrettably, the D:\ component of the name, and the specific deletion commanded the equivalent of UNIX rm -rf I tried looking for what made the LLM generate a command to wipe the guy's D drive, but the space problem seems to be what the LLM concluded so that's basically meaningless. The guy is asking leading questions so of course the LLM is going to find some kind of fault, whether it's correct or not, the LLM wants to be rewarded for complying with the user's prompt. Without the transcription of the actual delete event (rather than an LLM recapping its own output) we'll probably never know for sure what step made the LLM purge the guy's files. Looking at the comments and prompts, it looks like running "npm start dev" was too complicated a step for him. With that little command line experience, a catastrophic failure like this was inevitable, but I'm surprised how far he got with his vibe coded app before it all collapsed.
- whywhywhywhy 11mo ago> which made the command hunt for the word match ending space which was regrettably, the D:\ Is this even how the delete command would work in that situation? >rmdir /s /q D:\ETSY 2025\Antigravity Projects\Image Selector\client\node_modules.vite like wouldn't it just say "Folder D:\ETSY not found" rather than delete the parent folder
- viraptor 11mo agoMost dramatic stories on Reddit should be taken with a pinch of salt at least... LLM deleting a drive and the user just calmly asking it about that - maybe a lot more.
- baobabKoodaa 11mo agoI would like to know the same thing. Can someone please confirm this?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ndsipa_pomu 11mo ago> Basically, it seems to have come down to commanding a deletion of a "directory with space in the name" but without quoting which made the command hunt for the word match ending space which was regrettably, the D:\ component of the name, and the specific deletion commanded the equivalent of UNIX rm -rf More like the equivalent of "rm -rf --no-preserve-root". This is a rare example of where the Linux (it's not Unix and almost no-one uses Unix anymore) command is more cautious than the Windows one, whereas it's usually the Linux commands that just do exactly what you specify even if it's stupid.
- josefx 11mo ago> but without quoting which made the command hunt for the word match ending space which was regrettably, the D:\ component of the name Except the folder name did not start with a space. In an unquoted D:\Hello World, the command would match D:\Hello, not D:\ and D:\Hello would not delete the entire drive. How does AI even handle filepaths? Does it have a way to keep track of data that doesn't match a token or is it splitting the path into tokens and throwing everything unknown away?
- deltoidmaximus 11mo agoI assumed he had a folder that started with a space at the start of the name. Amusingly I just tried this and with Windows 11 explorer will just silently discard a space if you add it at the beginning of the folder name. You need to use cli mkdir " test" to actually get a space in the name.
- atq2119 11mo agoWe're all groping around in the dark here, but something that could have happened is a tokenizer artifact. The vocabularies I've seen tend to prefer tokens that start with a space. It feels somewhat plausible to me that an LLM sampling would "accidentally" pick the " Hello" token over the "Hello" token, leading to D:\ Hello in the command. And then that gets parsed as deleting the drive. I've seen similar issues in GitHub Copilot where it tried to generate field accessors and ended up producing an unidiomatic "base.foo. bar" with an extra space in there.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ectospheno 11mo agoI have 30 years experience working with computers and I get nervous running a three line bash script I wrote as root. How on earth people hook up LLMs to their command line and sleep at night is beyond my understanding.