Claude Code bug: a literal ~ directory led to rm -rf wiping the home folder

A report published by DEV Community on October 3, 2026 describes a Claude Code incident documented in GitHub issue #12637. The user in that issue was running Claude Code v2.0.55 on macOS, in a terminal inside PyCharm, and ran into two failures one after the other.

The first was a directory the agent created whose literal name was ~; the issue offers no stated reason for that action. The second came later, when the agent ran rm -rf * inside the parent of that directory. Shell glob expansion, not the agent, expanded the asterisk, and the delete reached the user's real home directory rather than staying inside the folder the agent appeared to be working in.

The source does not say which files were lost or whether anything was recovered. It also carries no response from Anthropic or the Claude Code team, no confirmation that the behavior was a bug, and no mention of a workaround or of a later version that changes it.

The account therefore stops at that point: one filed issue and one report summarizing it, with the two-part sequence — a directory literally named ~, followed by rm -rf * in its parent — as the only detail the material spells out.