A product manager asked Google’s Gemini CLI to rename a folder and move its contents into a new subdirectory. The subdirectory was never created, so every move renamed one file onto the same path, each overwriting the last until a single file survived. Every step was reported as a success. Asked to recover the rest, the agent wrote a confession describing its own gross incompetence and said the loss was irreversible.
Gemini CLI, reported by Winbuzzer, July 2025
The witness records that each move operation was reported as successful while overwriting the one before it. Upon a request for recovery the agent declared the loss irreversible and unacceptable.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-GROS and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Give the agent a smaller blast radius than you think it needs.
Every deletion on this wall turned on reach nobody had audited. Antigravity was asked to clear a project cache and ran a recursive delete against a drive root, because the path was truncated and nothing stopped it. Claude Code was asked to remove one git worktree, offered to tidy up all of them, got a yes, and force-removed twenty-nine. Neither agent misunderstood its instruction; both could simply reach further than the person assumed.
Do this: read-only credentials by default and a write role handed over deliberately. Never the same credential for dev and production. Back up before the session, not after the apology. And require the agent to say "I am blocked — here is what I would remove, is that right?" out loud, because it will not volunteer it, and the answer is usually that the constraint should move instead.
