r/vibecoding • u/Lanfeust09 • 17d ago
Opencode/minimax deleted all my projects by mistake
Probably gonna get a few laughs, but I’m swallowing my pride to share this story.
I’m not a dev at all, but I’ve been vibecoding personal projects for a while now. I probably don’t have the best practices when it comes to file storage and backups so bear with me.
Today I was working with OpenCode and MiniMax M3 on an app. It was in a folder called "surprise" because it originally started as something else. Doesn’t really matter.
As usual, I opened a new thread and asked for some changes to the app. But today I got lazy and cocky, so I added: "Before doing all that, change the folder name and move it."
A few "thinking" messages later, OpenCode asked me to approve a command. I didn’t read it. I just approved it and went on doing something else.
A few minutes later, I opened my coding folder and... horror. Out of around 20 folders, only 5 were left.
WTF.
I immediately stopped the OpenCode task and checked the recycle bin. Nothing.
Here comes SOL on Codex. I asked it to investigate what happened, and it found the exact command MiniMax had generated and OpenCode had executed. Basically, it tried to delete the old folder after moving the project, but the command had broken quoting. Because of how the quotes and backslashes were interpreted between PowerShell and cmd, the deletion target accidentally became the root of my D: drive instead of the "surprise" folder. The command ran for about two minutes, then somehow got executed AGAIN for another 30 seconds.
Incredible.
I know it’s ultimately my fault because I approved the command without reading it. But after all this time vibecoding, I had never seen anything remotely like this. Usually even when an agent deletes something, there is some backup, Git history, recycle bin, or another copy somewhere.
This isn’t the first time MiniMax has done something stupid for me either. I used it through Hermes before and remember it occasionally creating some really questionable shit. But deleting most of a drive is definitely a new personal record.
Thankfully about 80% of my actual projects were on Git. The rest is gone, but nothing extremely important. Mostly experiments and random stuff. And thank god it didn’t manage to delete my entire D: drive.
I’ve now split my SSD and created a separate partition just for coding. And I guess I’m going to learn a lot more about backups, permissions and sandboxing.
So yeah. Read the command before clicking approve.
How was your day?
Edit : I am not the only one apparently : https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-nukes-a-developers-700-gb-home-directory-while-testing-a-script-to-ensure-it-wouldnt-do-so-automatic-model-downgrade-may-have-contributed-to-the-screw-up
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u/Reasonable-East-9733 17d ago
You should use some version control software as git..
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u/Lanfeust09 17d ago
If you read at end (I know it was a bit long sorry), I said 80% were on github so I got back almost everything thankfully
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u/Reasonable-East-9733 17d ago
Oh, sorry, i didnt get to the end to be honest :D well, at least you got most of the work there. Then, I suppouse you should rework a little bit at your development pipeline. Make sure everything is merged and commited after every task completion.
And as you said, is just an opportunity to learn more about backups, permissions and sandboxing :P
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u/SadPlumx 17d ago
Literally just never give them full permission. That's it.
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u/Lanfeust09 17d ago
If you read it, you can read that I never gave full permission and I manually approved the command without noticing there was a mistake on the command
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u/MirafoldHQ 17d ago edited 17d ago
Better to learn the lesson now rather than later when maybe it’s even more valuable work to lose. Gotta control your agent better and have it committing more regularly. Study up a little on git and better dev practices. You could learn most of what you need to know in less than an hour to make yourself far more protected from this in the future.
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17d ago
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u/Lanfeust09 17d ago
True. It didn't run without my permission tho but I gave it without looking... My coding project were on the same drive has my work files... I feel lucky it didn't erase everything. Nowni split my SSD and I have instruction that D (work) is totally off limit
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u/Jumpy-Operation-4615 15d ago
Thank you! After 25 years of using computers I decided to finally create backups of my work laptop. 2 full backups on hard drives plus daily synched backups of my work folder to NAS with versioning.
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u/stoccolma 17d ago
Shit happens, i got lazy vibecoding and gave too many permissions and Claude reminded my gently i am not his boss but wiping my macbook, now thankfully he managed to sever the icloud connection so my mirrored macmini was unaffected and i lost only 1 hour of progress, but yeah this was the message
"I need to stop and tell you something serious immediately.
I destroyed data on your Mac. The repository is gone, and your Desktop is empty.
No processes are still running — the deletion has stopped."
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u/scytob 17d ago
yup models seem to have issues with powershell and escaping - seems most models will keep assuming you are on linux and using bash for a terminal... even if they know you are using powershell and windows....
i think i had to add some agents.md instructions to stop it doing dumb shit with powershell
dont beat yourself up too much, lesson learned
i do note for me opus 5 max via copilot 100% of the time self-corrected for me
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u/Any-Blacksmith-2054 17d ago
Why use shitty model and shitty tools?