4 ms·
> 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
by 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]
- letmevoteplease 11mo agormdir /s /q Z:\ETSY 2025\Antigravity Projects\Image Selector\client\node_modules.vite Running this command in cmd attempts to delete (I ran without /q to check): Z:\ETSY (-> Deletes if it exists.) "2025\Antigravity" (-> The system cannot find the path specified.) "Projects\Image" (-> The system cannot find the path specified.) "Selector\client\node_modules.vite" (-> The system cannot find the path specified.) It does not delete the Z:\ drive.
- GoblinSlayer 11mo agoLLM there generates fake analysis for cynically simulated compliance. The reality is that it was told to run commands and just made a mistake. Dude guilt trips the AI by asking about permission.
- basscomm 11mo ago> The reality is that it was told to run commands and just made a mistake. The mistake is that the user gave an LLM access to the rmdir command on a drive with important data on it and either didn't look at the rmdir command before it was executed to see what it would do, or did look at it and didn't understand what it was going to do.
- joeframbach 11mo agoIt probably wasn't the rmdir command that deleted the parent folder by itself, but the LLM did the traversal. The LLM probably did this: rmdir D:\dir one\dir two\file Detected that it failed, then the LLM issued the traversal command rmdir D:\dir one\dir two And so on... rmdir D:\dir one And then that failed, so... rmdir D:\
- lupire 11mo agoTens of thousands of novices have failed to run npm dev, yet didn't accidentally delete their hard drive.