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Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive

https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1p82or6/google_antigravity_just_deleted_the_contents_of/
71•tamnd•2h ago

Comments

akersten•2h ago
Most of the responses are just cut off midway through a sentence. I'm glad I could never figure out how to pay Google money for this product since it seems so half-baked.

Shocked that they're up nearly 70% YTD with results like this.

DeepYogurt•1h ago
[flagged]
ggm•1h ago
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•1h 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/irreversible) or the IDE simply makes a mistake that leads to disaster, which is also possible but sufficiently improbable to justify the risk.

sroussey•1h ago
I only run ai tools in dev containers, so blast radius is somewhat minimal.
fragmede•56m ago
umm, you have backups, right?
dmurray•46m ago
I understood Windows named some of the most important directories with spaces, then special characters in the name so that 3rd party applications would be absolutely sure to support them.

"Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" aren't there just because Microsoft has an inability to pick snappy names.

bossyTeacher•31m ago
Microsoft is hilariously bad at naming things
EGreg•15m ago
I remember they prepended the word “Microsoft” to official names of all their software.
reddalo•30m ago
Fun fact: that's not true for all Windows localizations. For example, it's called "Programmi" (one word) in Italian.

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).

Kelteseth•12m ago
Should have called it Progrämmchen, to also include umlauts Ü
echelon•14m ago
This is Google moving fast and breaking things.

This is a Google we've never seen before.

Dylan16807•11m ago
Please don't repeat some guy's guess about spaces as fact, especially when that's not how windows parses paths.
sunaookami•1h ago
"I turned off the safety feature enabled by default and am surprised when I shot myself in the foot!" sorry but absolutely no sympathy for someone running Antigravity in Turbo mode (this is not the default and it clearly states that Antigravity auto-executes Terminal commands) and not even denying the "rmdir" command.
eviks•45m ago
> it clearly states that Antigravity auto-executes Terminal commands

This isn't clarity, that would be stating that it can delete your whole drive without any confirmation in big red letters

Animats•1h ago
Can you run Google's AI in a sandbox? It ought to be possible to lock it to a Github branch, for example.
lifthrasiir•1h ago
Gemini CLI allows for a Docker-based sandbox, but only when configured in advance. I don't know about Antigravity.
PieUser•1h ago
The victim uploaded a video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpBK1vYAVlA
nomilk•1h ago
From Antiravity [0]:

> 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

rvz•1h ago
The hard drive should now feel a bit more lighter.
sunaookami•43m ago
It is now production-ready! :rocket:
donkeylazy456•1h ago
Write permission is needed to let AI yank-put frankenstein-ed codes for "vibe coding".

But I think it needs to be written in sandbox first, then it should acquire user interaction asking agreement before writes whatever on physical device.

I can't believe people let AI model do it without any buffer zone. At least write permission should be limited to current workspace.

lifthrasiir•57m ago
I think this is especially problematic for Windows, where a simple and effective lightweight sandboxing solution is absent AFAIK. Docker-based sandboxing is possible but very cumbersome and alien even to Windows-based developers.
donkeylazy456•48m ago
I don't like that we need to handle docker(container) ourselves for sandboxing such a light task load. The app should provide itself.
esseph•38m ago
The problem is you can't trust the app, therefore it must be sandboxed.
bossyTeacher•29m ago
>The app should provide itself.

The whole point of the container is trust. You can't delegate that unfortunately, ultimately, you need to be in control which is why the current crop of AI is so limited

jrjfjgkrj•13m ago
Windows Sandbox is built in, lightweight, but not easy to use programmatically (like an SSH into a VM)
lifthrasiir•10m ago
WSB is great by its own, but is relatively heavyweight compared to other OSes (namespaces in Linux, Seatbelt in macOS).
CobrastanJorji•54m ago
The most useful looking suggestion from the Reddit thread: turn of "Terminal Command Auto Execution."

1. Go to File > Preferences > Antigravity Settings

2. In the "Agent" panel, in the "Terminal" section, find "Terminal Command Auto Execution"

3. Consider using "Off"

eviks•54m ago
Play vibe games, win vibe prizes.

Though the cause isn't clear, the reddit post is another long could-be-total-drive-removing-nonsense AI conversation without an actual analysis and the command sequence that resulted in this

sunaookami•49m ago
This comment speaks volumes: https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1p82or6...
venturecruelty•31m ago
Nobody ever talks about how good vibes can turn really bad.
GaryBluto•47m ago
So he didn't wear the seatbelt and is blaming car manufacturer for him been flung through the windshield.
serial_dev•42m ago
He didn’t wear a seatbelt and is blaming a car manufacturer that the garage burned down the garage, then the house.
vander_elst•20m ago
The car was not really idle, it was driving and fast. It's more like it crashed into the garage and burned it. Btw iirc, even IRL a basic insurance policy does not cover the case where the car in the garage starts a fire and burns down your own house, you have to tick extra boxes to cover that.
venturecruelty•39m ago
When will Google ever be responsible for the software that they write? Genuinely curious.
GaryBluto•32m ago
When Google software deletes the contents of somebody's D:\ drive without requiring the user to explicitly allow it to. I don't like Google, I'd go as far to say that they've significantly worsened the internet, but this specific case is not the fault of Google.
fragmede•8m ago
For OpenAI, it's invoked as codex --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox, for Anthropic, it's claude --dangerously-skip-permissions. I don't know what it is for Antigravity, but yeah I'm sorry but I'm blaming the victim here.
croes•13m ago
Because the car manufacturers claimed the self driving car would avoid accidents.
wartywhoa23•31m ago
Total Vibeout.
orbital-decay•29m ago
Side note, that CoT summary they posted is done with a really small and dumb side model, and has absolutely nothing in common with the actual CoT Gemini uses. It's basically useless for any kind of debugging. Sure, the language the model is using in the reasoning chain is reward-hacked into something pretty misleading, but Deepmind does a lot for its actual readability in Gemini, and then does a lot to hide it behind this useless summary. They need it in Gemini 3 because they're doing hidden injections with their Model Armor that don't show up in this summary, so it's even more opaque than before. Every time their classifier has a false positive, most of the chain is dedicated to the processing of the injection it triggers, making the model hugely distracted from the actual task at hand.
jrjfjgkrj•14m ago
what is Model Armor? can you explain, or have a link?
lifthrasiir•8m ago
It's a customizable auditor for models offered via Vertex AI (among others), so to speak. [1]

[1] https://docs.cloud.google.com/security-command-center/docs/m...

venturecruelty•28m ago
Look, this is obviously terrible for someone who just lost most or perhaps all of their data. I do feel bad for whoever this is, because this is an unfortunate situation.

On the other hand, this is kind of what happens when you run random crap and don't know how your computer works? The problem with "vibes" is that sometimes the vibes are bad. I hope this person had backups and that this is a learning experience for them. You know, this kind of stuff didn't happen when I learned how to program with a C compiler and a book. The compiler only did what I told it to do, and most of the time, it threw an error. Maybe people should start there instead.

EGreg•14m ago
Just wait til AI botswarms do it to everyone at scale, without them having done anything at all…

And just remember, someone will write the usual comment: “AI adds nothing new, this was always the case”

Puzzled_Cheetah•25m ago
Ah, someone gave the intern root.

> "I also need to reproduce the command locally, with different paths, to see if the outcome is similar."

Uhm.

------------

I mean, sorry for the user whose drive got nuked, hopefully they've got a recent backup - at the same time, the AI's thoughts really sound like an intern.

> "I'm presently tackling a very pointed question: Did I ever get permission to wipe the D drive?"

> "I am so deeply, deeply sorry."

This shit's hilarious.

rdtsc•20m ago
> Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive.

"Where we're going, we won't need ~eyes~ drives" (Dr. Weir)

(https://eventhorizonfilm.fandom.com/wiki/Gravity_Drive)

koakuma-chan•14m ago
Why would you ever install that VScode fork

Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

https://tegabrain.com/Slop-Evader
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Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive

https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1p82or6/google_antigravity_just_deleted_the_...
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