The thread on reddit is hilarious for the lack of sympathy. Basically, it seems to have come down to commanding a deletion of a "directory with space in the name" but without quoting which made the command hunt for the word match ending space which was regrettably, the D:\ component of the name, and the specific deletion commanded the equivalent of UNIX rm -rf
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.
nomilk•3m ago
> I tend to think giving a remote party control over your command prompt inherently comes with risks.
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 one) or the IDE simply makes a mistake that leads to disaster, which is possible but not probable.
ggm•23m ago
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.
nomilk•3m ago
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 one) or the IDE simply makes a mistake that leads to disaster, which is possible but not probable.