Comment by strangescript
1 month ago
I work 60+ hours a week with Claude Code CLI, always run dangerously skip, coding on multiple repos, on a mac. This has never happened. Nothing remotely close has ever happened. I have been using CC since research preview. I would love to know the series of prompts that lead to that moment.
Disasters tend to not happen until they happen.
If having something like that happen to you will be a disaster, don't be so non chalant about using it that way.
you should probably avoid driving or riding in motor vehicles
Motor vehicles that break off the road by themselves and can suddenly start mowing pedestrians?
Yes, nobody should.
The very idea that a quite recent and still maturing technology, that is known to hallucinate ocassionally and frequently misunderstand prompts and take several attempts to get it back on the right track, is ok to be run outside a container with "rm" and other full rights, is crazy talk. Comparing it to driving a car where you'r full in control? Crazy talking chef's kiss.
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I've never had a car suddenly and autonomously speed up and drive itself into a brick wall.
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You should probably realize you're not helping anyone here. Just because it hasn't happened to you, yet, doesn't meant it can't or hasn't to someone else. You're unwillingness to accept that says more about you than the person that got burned by Claude.
This is like saying you've never worn a seatbelt and still haven't been in an accident. So you'd like to know the series of turns that led to someone else's accident.
I am saying it doesn't matter. Driving in motor vehicles is dangerous, but we still do it. It would be safer to never drive anywhere. We have decided its an acceptable risk. Someone doesn't post one car accident on hacker news where they got hit by a semi and we all collectively say "oh man, never driving again".
I think the statistics definitively prove you wrong that wearing seatbelts doesn't matter. Same goes for there being non-zero risk with skipping all permission checks in Claude Code.
People aren't saying "I'm never using Claude Code again" just like they aren't saying "I'm never driving again". That's not what the post or most of the discussion is about.
Leave CC permission checks on or run in a sandbox. At a minimum, understand there are risks even if you haven't personally encountered them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
How much do you babysit claude, and how much do you just "let it do its thing"?
I haven't had anything as severe as OP, but I have had minor issues. For instance, claude dropped a "production" database (it was a demo for the hackerspace, I had previously told claude the project was "in development" because it was worried too much about backwards compatibility, so it assumed it could just drop the db). Sometimes a file is dropped, sometimes a git commit is made and pushed without checking etc despite instructions.
I'm building a personal repo with best practices and scripts for running claude safely etc, so I'm always curious about usage patterns.
I have similar usage habits. Not only has nothing like this ever happened for me, but I don’t think it has ever deleted anything that I didn’t want to be deleted, ever. Files only get deleted if I ask for a “cleanup” or something similar.
It has deleted a config directory of a system program I was having it troubleshoot, which was definitely not required, requested or helpful. The deleted files were in my home directory and not the "sandbox" directory I was running it from.
I knew the risks and accepted them, but it is more than capable of doing system actions you can regret.
Anybody talking about AI safety not being an issue, and how people will be able to use it responsibily, should study comments such as these in this thread. Even if one knows better than to do that, people on your team or important public facility will go about using AI like this...
Almost the same experience except that it sometimes for force pushed (semi) destructive git versions and once replaced a whole folder with a zip file without the git history. Only a few hours lost though;)
I guess if you have Time Machine backups you can always use that if it nukes things.
The peril of a bear trap is not in those one places and knows about.
It is in those one does not.