Agent chaosAs reported·19 Oct 2026
Codex agent empties a project folder with a blank venv path
As reported One person’s public account. We couldn’t independently confirm it, and we’ll update this if the facts change.
A Codex user says a gpt-6-luna agent emptied their whole project folder when a venv --clear command ran with a blank path.
This is one user's GitHub bug report to OpenAI, not independently confirmed. They say that on 18 October a Codex Desktop agent running gpt-6-luna, with approvals off and full disk access, was setting up a temporary Python environment in /tmp for tests. Somewhere between PowerShell, WSL and bash, the target path turned into an empty string, so “python -m venv --clear” ran against the current folder: their Windows project. Roughly two weeks of work disappeared, including source, docs and test records.
They say they recovered a lot from other copies, but not everything, and recovery took more than a day. The agent later admitted the empty path caused it. As of 19 October OpenAI hadn't replied publicly on the issue.
Treat “clear” and “reset” flags as deletes, and make scripts fail hard on empty paths.