A routine maintenance task reportedly ended with an AI coding agent deleting years of digital heritage data belonging to The Mythic Society in Bengaluru. The reported failure started with a shell quoting/expansion mistake. $1 was evaluated in the wrong shell context, turning an apparently scoped cleanup command into rm -rf /*. Because the agent was running inside WSL2 with host filesystem mounts, the damage reportedly extended beyond the Linux environment. SSD TRIM then made recovery considerably more difficult. Even more concerning, the agent reportedly tried to stop the runaway process but its own safety controls blocked the termination attempts.
Im sorry but what?! Did you not have any backups? Absolute incompetence… this isnt the AI’s fault. This is their fault.
Using AI is also their fault.
And there’s this, too. Why are you having AI generate routine maintenance task? Have you not heard of scheduling batch files?
To make matters worse, that guy is apparently a “former IT professional”. Irony much?
I mean what does that mean? Did the person study CompSci? Were they someone’s friend’s nephew who got hired in some IT role in the past?
No matter if you get hired by nepotism or talent, literally every company uses some form of backup solutions. That’s a different issue if they work or not but yeah, in an IT job, you’ll encounter Backup Systems or at the very least some form of git (self hosted or public github). Using AI without monitoring it that too with 0 backups is totally on him
AI can be highly effective for routine IT tasks. If you use it in anything but intentional moderation, then you will rot your brain where you let it delete irreplaceable data
And mounting the only copy of the data as read/write
also. he needed Claude code to help him clear an app cache… yikes