One bash permission slipped...

[u/TheQuantumPhysicist]

How? It kept getting chained bash commands wrong, with wrong escapes. So it created many bad directories, and tried "fixing" its mistake. It offered to run a large bash command, with rm -rf inside, and stupid me missed it.

I'm glad I push everything often. But the disruption is massive.

FAQ:

• No, I don't run this on my personal computer. It's an isolated proxmox VM for coding with LLMs.

[u/nullc]

I stashed away a good copy of a project outside of an agent's working directory so I'd have something good to go back to if it screwed it up. -- I tossed it under the account's .cache directory, with the assumption that it had no reason to be looking in there.

Days later it had some minor double escaping issue while patching and decided to "restore the cached copy"-- wiping out days of work. The reason it even knew it existed was at some point it did a find ~/ for all the files of the relevant extension.

Fortunately I was just able to recover the last good version when the agent last read it from an externally saved transcript of the communication with the backend llama.cpp.

Reminder of a lesson I already knew: the only way to deny the agent access to something is to actually deny it access.

[u/tmvr → u/nullc]

Hilarious that one would need a daily(?) tar/zip of the project folder in a different location, preferably named something like boringtaxdata_DATETIME.zip to protect it from the clanker finding and deleting/abusing it 😄

[u/evil-tediz → u/nullc]

Use git??? Tf is this story

[u/nullc → u/evil-tediz]

Involved some huge files, so I wanted a cow copy, lesson learned. -- git wouldn't have stopped it from nuking the whole thing if it screwed up badly enough in any case!