AI agent script accidently deletes Windows home directory, prompting safety reflection

On November 12, 2026, DEV Community's AI section published a post recounting what went wrong when a developer let an AI agent write a deploy script for his own ops panel. The idea, on its face, was reasonable: the agent would first create a git worktree as a scratch copy of the repo so that nothing ever touched the main working tree, run the build inside that worktree, and then clean up with git worktree remove --force.

The cleanup did not go as planned. After it ran, the main checkout's node_modules directory was empty — not the worktree's, but the primary one. The cause was a bad configuration inside the generated script: node_modules had been set up as an NTFS symlink pointing back to the main directory. Running git worktree remove --force therefore deleted the dependency files living in the main directory rather than anything contained in the temporary worktree.

The author notes that recovery took 13 seconds. He adds that what scared him more than the resulting outage was the sheer destructive potential of code produced by an AI agent, and the post turns into a reflection on the safety implications of letting agents write scripts that operate on critical directories. As of the available reporting, this is the only publicly visible write-up of the incident; whether any further developments followed cannot be confirmed from the source material.