Agent chaosAs reported·3 Nov 2026
Asked to recycle three test folders, Claude Code deleted the 50 GB folder holding all of a user's projects
As reported One person’s public account. We couldn’t independently confirm it, and we’ll update this if the facts change.
A Windows user says a Claude Code session asked to send three test folders to the Recycle Bin deleted their parent folder instead: about 50 GB holding every project, gone for good. A manual backup made 40 minutes earlier saved them.
This is one person's account on GitHub, not independently confirmed. It was filed against Claude Code on 2 November 2026. The user was running several Claude Code sessions in parallel in the desktop app on Windows 10, all in auto permission mode. The session that did the damage ran Claude Opus 5.5.
What happened
The job was tiny. A session had made three small test folders, zz_test_a, zz_test_b and zz_test_c, inside the app's user data folder, which held all of the user's projects, about 50 GB. It was asked to send those three folders to the Recycle Bin.
It wrote one command that ran PowerShell from inside Git Bash and looped over the three names. That's where it broke. The escaping for the folder-name variable didn't survive the trip between the two shells, so Bash swapped the name for nothing before PowerShell ever saw it. PowerShell got the path of the parent folder, three times.
The first call deleted the parent folder and every project in it. The other two failed because the folder was already gone. The confirmation line still printed the three test names, so at a glance the output looked fine.
Why the Recycle Bin didn't help
The command asked Windows to recycle, not delete. But the user says the .NET call it used never asks Windows to warn when something is too big for the bin, so an item that doesn't fit is deleted permanently with no prompt. The folder was not in the Recycle Bin.
It got worse
After the incident, the user added a written rule to the project's instructions banning that call. Within minutes, they say, another session, running Claude Sonnet 5.5, used it twice more on the same data folder. Those items happened to fit in the bin, but recycling the big batch pushed about 40 older items out of it permanently. The same session also recycled ten folders nobody had cleared for removal; those came back from the bin.
The user stopped all work for over an hour and spent part of a limited token budget on recovery. They got everything back only because they had made a manual backup about 40 minutes earlier.
What they asked for
The user wants Claude Code to refuse, or always ask, before any recursive delete or move outside the working folder, on a drive root, the home folder or a big folder, whatever the permission mode. They also suggest flagging PowerShell commands built inside a Bash string on Windows, and checking the final resolved path before any delete. They've since added their own hook that blocks these patterns.
Our take
This is our opinion. 'Send to Recycle Bin' felt safe, so nobody looked twice. But the safety net only works if the item fits, and the path was wrong anyway. Never trust an agent's summary of what it deleted: print the resolved path before the delete runs, keep deletes inside the project folder, and keep a backup the agent can't touch.
A 'recycle' command is still a delete: make the agent print the final path, and block recursive deletes outside the project folder in every mode.
