GPT 5.3 Codex wiped my F: drive with a single character escaping bug
old.reddit.comescaping bugs in llm-generated code are weirdly hard to catch on review because the logic looks fine - it's the edge cases that are off. had a similar (much less dramatic) thing with a cleanup script that worked fine on ci but went sideways on a dev machine with spaces in the path. nothing wiped but it was close enough that i started testing path handling separately.
the tricky part is the model isn't really "wrong" in any obvious sense. works on most inputs. it just doesn't know what your actual directory structure looks like.
Nothing surprising and OP seem understandable of what have happened. But I should maybe take the opportunity here and remind you guys to:
- Use version control
- Backup your things somewhere (not same drive or use Cloud / NAS whatever), Windows have a cool feature called File history! But no one trusts Windows anyways so stick to external backup
- Restrict the agent a lot, make it least-privileged user
- Restrict it in a virtualized filesystem so it cannot work outside of its scope
- Devcontainers?
- Do not use auto allow actions, always supervise the actions it wants to perform outside reading/writing code
- Avoid fully automated agents at all outside of sandboxed environments haha
I think we need rollback feature with filesystem capabilities. Seeing a lot of similar issues.
... so ZFS?
Damn. Crazy how the AI made them not use backups.
Are people giving coding agents full filesystem access to their primary machines nowadays?
As the thread makes clear, it was someone who doesn't have backups. Does that kind of person give AI agents full access?
Yes. It’s like Tesla FSD but for coding with the obvious/inevitable crashes