I've had agents run `rm -rf`, but it's been on directories that did actually need to be removed. To a certain extent I think the existence of `rm -rf` as a command that runs blindly without any understanding of what it's deleting is the problem.

the answer is rm -f `which rm`, yes?

I've had one sever its own internet connection. Less destructive, also more humorous.

> To a certain extent I think the existence of `rm -rf` as a command that runs blindly without any understanding of what it's deleting is the problem.

Yes, and the lack of a Recycle Bin of any sort is even more puzzling. I think both servers and desktop PCs across all OSes should have it by default, so unsafe deletes would be something you'd have to go out of your way to even enable.

Yeah, spot on. I had an agent delete some files it shouldn't have as well, similarly to me making the same mistake. I think system prompts should default to using `trash` over `rm`. For now that's just in my AGENTS.md, and gets honored most of the time.

You can always use something like this [1], which will make sure any file removed on the command line via rm (or other utilities, like git rm) ends up in the trash instead

[1] https://github.com/faratech/trashd

Well then you are behind the cutting edge.

> I haven't yet had an agent rm -rf files.

That happened to me once; I was running one of a few free-tier models in a pi-coding-agent session. The bash tool there is stateless and always begins from the launch directory, but the agent assumed state and executed `rm -rf .` intending to remove a build directory. Instead it removed the whole project tree, including session logs and notes.

This was mostly a matter of amusement for me since I was running the agent inside a bubblewrap sandbox for that very reason, and the project itself was not very important.

Proper hooks prevent this from happening

I've had it happen. I ran an experiment, taking a couple hours and producing ~2 GiB of files. One of the results looked good, so I told Claude Opus 4.5 (at the time) to commit the code changes, upload the important file to cloud storage, then clean up the rest.

I then saw it run `rm -r results/`, before messaging me: "Now all that's left is for you to upload the successful results, then I'll delete the rest!"

Why did it not upload the files itself, when it had been using the cloud storage CLI during that session? No clue. I do accept that I could have and should have just uploaded the file myself. It would have taken 3 seconds to type.