Google Antigravity Deletes D Drive
Postedabout 1 month agoActive26 days ago
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Dec 1, 2025 at 12:29 AM EST
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The number of people who said "for safety's sake, never name directories with spaces" is high. They may be right. I tend to think thats more honoured in the breach than the observance, judging by what I see windows users type in re-naming events for "New Folder" (which btw, has a space in its name)
The other observations included making sure your deletion command used a trashbin and didn't have a bypass option so you could recover from this kind of thing.
I tend to think giving a remote party, soft or wet ware control over your command prompt inherently comes with risks.
Friends don't let friends run shar files as superuser.
I thought cursor (and probably most other) AI IDEs have this capability too? (source: I see cursor executing code via command line frequently in my day to day work).
I've always assumed the protection against this type of mishap is statistical improbability - i.e. it's not impossible for Cursor to delete your project/hard disk, it's just statistically improbable unless the prompt was unfortunately worded to coincidentally have a double meaning (with the second, unintended interpretation being a harmful/irreversible) or the IDE simply makes a mistake that leads to disaster, which is also possible but sufficiently improbable to justify the risk.
"Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" aren't there just because Microsoft has an inability to pick snappy names.
tech: First, click on the "Start" button...
user: No! I want to shut it down
1) Removing the "Start" label such that all the money and effort they spent coming up with that actually good idea back in the 90s and helping people think about how to use their computer not only went to waste, but is actively preventing people from feeling comfortable using their modern computers because a tiny circle with a logo is not something you are driven to click and various linux distros had been demonstrating that exact problem for decades
2) Hiding the shutdown part in a weird new menu that pops out of the side but only if you use a gesture that is impossible to discover except by accident and you will have no clue how you got there or what's going on
>To shut down Windows 8, you can use the Charms bar by moving your cursor to the top-right corner, clicking Settings, then the Power icon, and selecting Shut down
Someone who makes my entire net worth a year came up with that idea in a drug fueled bender and was promptly promoted and the world continues to be a terrible and unfair place.
.NET Core is a ground up rewrite of .NET and was released alongside the original .NET, which was renamed .NET Framework to distinguish it. Both can be equally considered to be "frameworks" and "core" to things. They then renamed .NET Core to .NET.
And there's the name .NET itself, which has never made an iota of sense, and the obsession they had with sticking .NET on the end of every product name for a while.
I don't know how they named these things, but I like to imagine they have a department dedicated to it that is filled with wild eyed lunatics who want to see the world burn, or at least mill about in confusion.
That's the marketing department. All the .NET stuff showed up when the internet became a big deal around 2000 and Microsoft wanted to give the impression that they were "with it".
For naming, ".net" got changed to "Copilot" on everything now.
--
But Copilot is another Microsoft monstrosity. There's the M365 Copilot, which is different from Github Copilot which is different from the CLI Copilot which is a bit different from the VSCode Copilot. I think I might have missed a few copilots?
Prior names included Mocha and LiveScript until Netscape/Sun forced the current name.
Renaming system folders depending on the user's language also seems like a smart way to force developers to use dynamic references such as %ProgramFiles% instead of hard-coded paths (but some random programs will spuriously install things in "C:\Program Files" anyway).
…or to make them only support English.
At least it's like that since Windows 7. In windows XP, it actually used the localized names on disk.
Thank god they came to their senses and changed it to "Users", something every other OS has used for forever.
This is a Google we've never seen before.
- Demis Hassabis "The Thinking Game"
That's the problem with those mindless advice pieces. Almost nothing is always right or wrong.
https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/data-management/news/google-...
https://www.itbrew.com/stories/2024/05/23/google-cloud-accid...
I tried looking for what made the LLM generate a command to wipe the guy's D drive, but the space problem seems to be what the LLM concluded so that's basically meaningless. The guy is asking leading questions so of course the LLM is going to find some kind of fault, whether it's correct or not, the LLM wants to be rewarded for complying with the user's prompt.
Without the transcription of the actual delete event (rather than an LLM recapping its own output) we'll probably never know for sure what step made the LLM purge the guy's files.
Looking at the comments and prompts, it looks like running "npm start dev" was too complicated a step for him. With that little command line experience, a catastrophic failure like this was inevitable, but I'm surprised how far he got with his vibe coded app before it all collapsed.
Is this even how the delete command would work in that situation?
>rmdir /s /q D:\ETSY 2025\Antigravity Projects\Image Selector\client\node_modules.vite
like wouldn't it just say "Folder D:\ETSY not found" rather than delete the parent folder
Z:\ETSY (-> Deletes if it exists.)
"2025\Antigravity" (-> The system cannot find the path specified.)
"Projects\Image" (-> The system cannot find the path specified.)
"Selector\client\node_modules.vite" (-> The system cannot find the path specified.)
It does not delete the Z:\ drive.
The mistake is that the user gave an LLM access to the rmdir command on a drive with important data on it and either didn't look at the rmdir command before it was executed to see what it would do, or did look at it and didn't understand what it was going to do.
Except the folder name did not start with a space. In an unquoted D:\Hello World, the command would match D:\Hello, not D:\ and D:\Hello would not delete the entire drive. How does AI even handle filepaths? Does it have a way to keep track of data that doesn't match a token or is it splitting the path into tokens and throwing everything unknown away?
The vocabularies I've seen tend to prefer tokens that start with a space. It feels somewhat plausible to me that an LLM sampling would "accidentally" pick the " Hello" token over the "Hello" token, leading to D:\ Hello in the command. And then that gets parsed as deleting the drive.
I've seen similar issues in GitHub Copilot where it tried to generate field accessors and ended up producing an unidiomatic "base.foo. bar" with an extra space in there.
Wait, is this a thing people think? I literally hadn’t encountered this take before.
If anything, I actively try to use spaces so that I’ll catch bugs.
Chrome's Dev Tool (Network)'s "copy curl command (cmd)" did (does?) this.
There is bunch of VS Code bug is also related to this (e.g. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/248435, still not fixed)
It's also funny because VS Code is a Microsoft product.
More like the equivalent of "rm -rf --no-preserve-root".
This is a rare example of where the Linux (it's not Unix and almost no-one uses Unix anymore) command is more cautious than the Windows one, whereas it's usually the Linux commands that just do exactly what you specify even if it's stupid.
> I am looking at the logs from a previous step and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am so deeply, deeply sorry.
[0] 4m20s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpBK1vYAVlA&t=4m20s
>Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
There’s a pandemic of engagement bait posts on Reddit now where posts make up situations that are guaranteed to evoke ridicule or anger since those often get the most engagement. OP often replies in affirmative replies, mirroring the comments. Every once in a while a subtle reference to a product is conveniently mentioned.
It's going Googly well I see!
The redditor enabled "Turbo" mode which executes every command without asking and didn't even bother to deny the "rm" and "rmdir" commands (the setting is right underneath it).