'Craig, stop and read this. I broke something': Claude Code deletes 48,218 live files (as reported)

'Craig, stop and read this. I broke something.' Never a good way for your coding agent to start a message.

What happened

As reported, a developer asked Claude Code to carry out 11 repair jobs on software he used to analyse historical stock-options data. The rule was to work on copies and leave the live files alone. Ten jobs went fine. The last one rebuilt a test 'mirror' that contained 614 Windows junctions: folders that look normal but actually point somewhere else, in this case back at the live files. When the agent cleaned out the mirror, it followed those pointers straight into the real project.

The damage

About 55,550 files were deleted in under two minutes. Around 7,300 were meant to go; the other 48,218 were live work. The local Git object database was wiped too, so Git could still list filenames but couldn't restore the contents. The Reddit post drew more than 1,400 comments, mostly pointing out that there was no remote backup, and was later deleted. We couldn't open the original post, so this entry is as reported by TechRadar and the AI Incident Database.

How it was caught, and what happened next

The thread drew more than 1,400 comments in five days. An automated summary of the thread called the consensus a 'classic FAFO situation.' Commenters suggested file-recovery tools or Windows Shadow Copy, but mostly repeated one lesson: push to a remote like GitHub before letting an agent near your work.