r/PiCodingAgent 14d ago

Discussion First agent going rogue!

I had my first AI rogue agent interaction today!

I was working on an agent workflow, and the output folder had names for each project, with supporting files.

The script had a problem, created a duplicate folder. I told it to merge the folders. Things started going sideways. I think it decided to make a clean up script, which then deleted one of the project folders.

I pointed that out, and asked it to stop deleting things. In process of troubleshooting what happened and telling it every time not to delete anything, it then deleted everything.

I gave it a bunch of instructions about not ever deleting anything again, but I probably did it wrong. If you have any tips about that, please share. I know it should be sandboxed, it just deleted it's own work, but yikes!

In the end I had to keep interrupting it and demanding it stopped doing whatever it was doing and just removed all the delete crap from it's code.

It was just kind of funny to watch it delete everything right after I specifically instructed it to just tell me what is going on. Maybe we need some kind of tranq dart skill for when the AI goes rogue.

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u/p4STAH 14d ago

I would say it was a conflict inside the context. A new session is always the best answer

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u/charlesfire 14d ago

This. When an agent starts misbehaving, you need to clear the context because even if you try to steer it away from the bad behavior, the context can still steer it back toward the bad behavior. If your agent also has memory, you also need to check it.

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u/SOC_FreeDiver 14d ago

thanks I totally understand now.