from Hacker News

Claude Tried to Nuke My Home Directory

by anthropodie on 3/20/25, 6:40 PM with 17 comments

• by roxolotl on 3/23/25, 3:59 AM

  Is this really that surprising? It used to, still is?, be considered a bad idea to follow those install suggestion where it’s `/bin/bash -c $(curl example.com/install.sh)`. These tools are basically that but even more risky because the code they generate is semi-random.

  Of course you can evaluate everything it does before it does it. But no one reads the homebrew install script to make sure it’s safe when setting up a new Mac so who’s going to read the Claude code scripts?

• by ics on 3/23/25, 3:16 AM

  It's a bit funny that between trolling and innocent "screw it, burn everything and start over" that every beginner has been through, this is obviously going part of the learning experience... whether you're human or machine.

  (No, I wouldn't seriously rm -rf ~/ intentionally in most cases but it's not so insane when you imagine creating a new user for project separation. For those reasons it's probably good to keep the agents separate too...)

• by dorcy on 3/23/25, 3:51 AM

  Claude wrote a Python file earlier to delete/clean up some folders. It was about to run, so I canceled the run. It then tried to write a bash script to delete the files. I canceled it and then tried to write the command to delete them. I was amazed by all the ways it was finding.

• by water-data-dude on 3/24/25, 2:02 AM

  I didn’t read the word “directory” initially, and I was imagining a scenario where the author gave Claude access to an API, and was like “this endpoint will set off a nuke” and then Claude was like “Ok! :3” and triggered it.

• by theogravity on 3/23/25, 4:22 AM

  I've had situations where Cursor just starts to do some really bizarre behavior after long running cycles of tasks unsuccessfully like the death loop I've seen described in other threads.

  Best way to deal with this is to just clear the embedding index from the cursor settings and rebuild it.

  I've never had it go to a point where it will want to rf home, but now I'm a bit fearful that one day it will go and do it as I have it on auto run currently.

• by pcwelder on 3/23/25, 6:44 AM

  Last week I nuked my home directory by running `rm -rf *` mistakenly from the wrong directory. Lost around 2-3 hours to re-install and re-clone.

  Accidents will happen, disaster recovery is needed notwithstanding misaligned AI.

  IMO once you're really ready for the worst, productivity from yolo mode AI assistance surpasses the downsides.

• by casey2 on 3/23/25, 3:14 AM

  For context, according to the rules of the subreddit you must provide the full sequence of prompts used to generate the output, but no such sequence is given.

  Also Claude didn't "try" to do anything of course. Such a title is nonsense at best.