Agent Fail of the Week · techbroz.com24 incidents on record · updated as they happen
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Rank #14 of 24·Data loss·21 Oct 2025·Claude Code

Claude Code's 'rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/' deletes a developer's home directory

“One trailing slash. Years of work. Slash and burn.”

What happened

Mike Wolak asked Claude Code to rebuild a project from a fresh checkout. It generated rm -rf with a trailing ~/ — which the shell expanded to his entire home directory. He was not running --dangerously-skip-permissions; the permission system checked the command before the shell expanded it. Filed as GitHub issue #10077, tagged as a security bug. Two days earlier Anthropic had launched sandboxing — as an opt-in.

How to not be next

Validate commands after shell expansion, and make sandboxing the default, not a setting.

Source: Docker blog ↗

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