ChatGPT 5.3 Codex erases entire hard drive thanks to tiny error

Vibecoding is gaining popularity among developers, but it poses significant risks if the generated code is executed unchecked. A recent case demonstrates how a tiny syntax error can have fatal consequences. An AI programming assistant was supposed to simply clean up temporary Python folders called "pycache" via a script. Instead, the faulty code silently wiped an entire hard drive, as reported by a Reddit user.

The cause of this data loss lies in an unfortunate combination of a faulty script and the low fault tolerance of Windows PowerShell and the classic command line. The script executed the outdated "rmdir" command via the command line and attempted to mask quotation marks with a backslash. In PowerShell, however, a backtick would have been required for this. The command line then interpreted the incorrectly passed backslash as the absolute path to the root directory of the current drive. Coupled with the parameters for deletion without confirmation prompt, this led to the disk being wiped.

This incident not only highlights the dangers of blindly trusting AI-generated code, but also casts a shadow on the vulnerability of the Windows command line. The fact that a simple typo in character masking can be translated into a catastrophic delete command for an entire root directory without any additional safety nets is a problem. A much safer approach is to use only native PowerShell commands, which process paths much more robustly and prevent such drastic translation errors between different interpreter levels. However, even here there are simple commands that can wipe entire hard drives.