Claude Tried to Nuke My Home Directory(old.reddit.com) |
Claude Tried to Nuke My Home Directory(old.reddit.com) |
Of course you can evaluate everything it does before it does it. But no one reads the homebrew install script to make sure it’s safe when setting up a new Mac so who’s going to read the Claude code scripts?
What I think is completely missed is that the bottleneck in knowledge work is understanding and making sure about what is built and done.
(No, I wouldn't seriously rm -rf ~/ intentionally in most cases but it's not so insane when you imagine creating a new user for project separation. For those reasons it's probably good to keep the agents separate too...)
Best way to deal with this is to just clear the embedding index from the cursor settings and rebuild it.
I've never had it go to a point where it will want to rf home, but now I'm a bit fearful that one day it will go and do it as I have it on auto run currently.
Accidents will happen, disaster recovery is needed notwithstanding misaligned AI.
IMO once you're really ready for the worst, productivity from yolo mode AI assistance surpasses the downsides.
alias rm="rm --interactive"
(On Mac and other systems with BSD versions of tools, `--interactive` is `-i` and `--force` is `-f`.)
> touch foo
> ls -l
-rw-r--r--. 1 foo foo 0 Mar 24 05:54 foo
> chmod a-w foo
> ls -l
-r--r--r--. 1 foo foo 0 Mar 24 05:54 foo
> rm foo
rm: remove write-protected regular empty file 'foo'? n
> rm -i foo
rm: remove write-protected regular empty file 'foo'? n
> rm -i -f foo
>
Also Claude didn't "try" to do anything of course. Such a title is nonsense at best.
It just continues to do things... That's the value prop.
My alias is intended to provide the same protection against accidental deletions of non-write-protected files. I only pass the `-f` when I'm certain I know what I'm doing.
If I still want the raw behavior as you called out, I can use the full path to `rm`. But for me, I've unintentionally lost more files that I have write permissions on through bad rm commands than any lost from my alias with `-f`, which I can't recall having lost any with.
because for write-protected files '-i' is a no-op.
you are probably right that the risk of accidentally deleting a write protected file is very small, simply because using those permissions is very rare.
but there is another problem i have with using an alias, this may not apply to you, but i work on multiple machines and in containers, and i keep creating new ones for projects, that there is a high risk that i forget to set the alias. so every time i use rm i can't be sure, did i set the alias, or did i not. and if i rely on 'rm' always asking me, then it makes me complacent. ah, i don't have to pay attention because rm will ask me anyways.
writing 'rm -i' explicitly every time makes it much easier to see that '-i' is indeed being invoked. it makes me pay attention and i know that i am running the command that i want. it's three extra characters to type each time, but it has become muscle memory. i don't think about it anymore, except when verifying what i typed. the '-i' just has to be there.
On my machine, `rm -i` with a yes to a read-only file does delete that file. But maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by it being a no-op.
> touch foo
> chmod 400 foo
> ls -l
total 0
-r-------- 1 joshua joshua 0 Mar 26 00:06 foo
> rm -i foo
rm: remove write-protected regular empty file 'foo'? y
> ls -l
total 0
Oh yea. I've definitely run into this. Luckily, a large percentage of my stuff off my dev machine is backed by code, so I can usually just throw things away and bring them all the way back up.
> writing 'rm -i' explicitly every time makes it much easier to see that '-i' is indeed being invoked. it makes me pay attention and i know that i am running the command that i want. it's three extra characters to type each time, but it has become muscle memory. i don't think about it anymore, except when verifying what i typed. the '-i' just has to be there.
Ha. I know that feeling, and this is probably something I should've let happen to me with these dangerous commands. Would definitely make my experience with cp a lot better. I have so many aliases I've made to make my life easier, but I just end up typing in the full command every time. :D
'rm' (without '-i') does exactly the same. so for read-only files, '-i' changes nothing.
whereas '-f' does change the behavior of 'rm' on read-only files. it doesn't just override '-i'.
I had thought you mean that `rm -i` would do nothing to read-only files. Not that the flag itself was a no-op.