Asked to free up disk space, Claude Code deleted a student's whole game project, the student says

This is one person's account on GitHub, not independently confirmed. It was filed as a bug report against Claude Code on 24 October 2026, labelled data loss and high priority, and was still open when we read it.

What happened

The student says they've used Claude Code with Opus on Windows every day for months on their own projects: a web app friends use live, a co-op game built as a gift for a friend, and two Roblox games. On 24 October they asked it to free up disk space. What they meant was the recordings and screenshots taking up room.

According to the report, Claude Code deleted the whole game project instead: all the source code, its docs, its decision notes, playtest logs and its own records of the student's feedback. There was no remote copy, and they say it can't be recovered. They also say it had to be told afterwards that this wasn't what they'd asked for. Their permission mode was set to auto-accept edits.

The same day

The report lists other problems on 24 October with the friends' live web app. The student says the agent stopped the server while a friend was in the live lobby: the 'who's online' check ran in the same command as the shutdown, printed the friend's name, and the shutdown went ahead anyway. They also say it added 69 items to a shared library, 54 of them duplicates, and removed 120 correct audio files on a rule it made up, which they caught and restored.

The bigger complaint

The student says a hook has logged every turn where they had to correct the agent since 15 October, and that, together with an earlier review of their chat history, it adds up to more than 700 counted corrections over several months. They say the numbers come from Claude Code's own session records, and that they paid for several subscriptions at once. They also say Anthropic support declined their requests, including a refund request. We haven't seen the logs or any reply from Anthropic.

What they asked for

A human review of the refund request, and a real safeguard against wide, irreversible deletes in Claude Code: confirm the scope first, or move things to a trash folder instead of deleting them for good.

Lesson for builders

This is our opinion. 'Free up space' is a vague order, and a vague order plus delete rights is how a source tree disappears. Push every project to a remote, even a private one, before an agent works on it. Turn off auto-accept for anything that deletes, make the agent list exactly what it will remove first, and never run a safety check in the same command as the action it is meant to stop.