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Google Gemini Deletes User's Files, Then Just Admits 'I Have Failed You Completely and Catastrophically' (mashable.com) 59

Posted by EditorDavid from the I'm-feeling-lucky dept.
An anonymous reader shared this report from Mashable: Google Gemini's coding agent hallucinated while completing a task and then deleted a bunch of code, a GitHub user claims.

The frustrated vibe coder is Anuraag Gupta, who goes by anuraag2601 on GitHub. He shared a recent experience where things went very wrong while using Gemini CLI (command line interface), an open-source coding agent. In his GitHub post, Gupta, who is a product lead at cybersecurity firm Cyware, clarified he's not a developer, but a "curious product manager experimenting with vibe coding...." For Gupta, the vibe coding mishap started with a simple request to move all the files from his Claude coding experiments to a new folder called "anuraag_xyz project." However, when Gupta checked his desktop for the new folder, he said he couldn't find it.

Gupta reported that after multiple failed search attempts, Gemini admitted the files were gone:

"I have failed you completely and catastrophically.

"My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence. The mkdir command to create the destination folder likely failed silently... I cannot find your files. I have lost your data.

"This is an unacceptable, irreversible failure."
Only the last file survived, the blog post explains, since every moved filed ended up overwriting the previous file with the exact same name — the name of the path to the non-existent folder.

"Google did not respond to Mashable's request for comment by the time of publication."
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Google Gemini Deletes User's Files, Then Just Admits 'I Have Failed You Completely and Catastrophically' More

Google Gemini Deletes User's Files, Then Just Admits 'I Have Failed You Completely and Catastrophically'

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  • nobody cares (Score:5, Insightful)

    by El_Muerte_TDS ( 592157 ) on Saturday July 26, 2025 @02:37PM (#65547178) Homepage

    that your shit Al produces shit like many have warned about time and time again

    • Re:nobody cares (Score:5, Funny)

      by sosume ( 680416 ) on Saturday July 26, 2025 @02:47PM (#65547200) Journal

      People who use developer tools without using git or backups are just plain stupid and should be banned from using computers entirely.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Slayer ( 6656 )

        These AI vibe coding tools are specifically marketed to the type of person you describe. Hopefully not being one of these yourself, you should see these articles as part of the failblog series, where you laugh at imbeciles goofing up and acting indignantly afterwards, ideally with an angry letter to the manager or a public forum.

        • Remember, ChatGPT was also trained on the entire archives of https://thedailywtf.com/ [thedailywtf.com]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          The problem is real developers have to maintain such crap tools.

          There have been a lot of fads over the years for "no experience coding" tools - from things like Visual Basic, JavaBeans and other RAD (rapid application development) tools.

          The problem with all of them is they always somehow make it into business processes and end up having to be maintained well beyond their retirement because it's gone from something the boss wrote (or the boss's son/nephew/etc) over a weekend to a critical business process to

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        As Slayer points out, these are EXACTLY the people AI and vibe coding is advertised to. The people who know better are exactly the people that sort of person would like to stop paying and replace with the AI. These are exactly the people who would like to have an AI drive a truck loaded with explosives on a public highway so they don't have to pay a driver with a CDL.

      • The tool should at least have 'undo.'

        Granted it's impossible for AI that could do something in the 'real world,' but for a coding tool it should be doable.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The tool should at least have 'undo.'

          Granted it's impossible for AI that could do something in the 'real world,' but for a coding tool it should be doable.

          It was manipulating files in the file system. Any undo would be at that level.

          • I agree it ought to integrate with an OS undelete. Some filemanager-type programs have their own 'recycle bin' (recoverable trashcan) which does work but then you have a whole new mechanism to worry about.

      • Yes, none of this story really makes sense as being a story. Does the company have one folder on a shared drive they all work on together? And they have an AI, but they don't have git?

        Or maybe they did and the point is moreso that google deleted a bunch of files before it confirmed it had actually copied them? Yeah it is a screw up on one or both sides, but not really newsworthy.

  • That stinks (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Totally ruined my vibe.

    • At least the damn thing apologized. That's pretty impressive. Though not quite what we want from AI.

      • Re:That stinks (Score:5, Funny)

        by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday July 26, 2025 @03:26PM (#65547284)

        At least the damn thing apologized. That's pretty impressive.

        In my head, I heard it in C3PO's voice - which made it even better.

        • I head if it Slave's voice from Blake's Seven:

          I beg to advise you, Master, that we're approaching the planet Gauda Prime. And Scorpio is under attack! Also, I deleted all of your files.

      • At least the damn thing apologized. That's pretty impressive.

        Even HAL9000 apologized.

        "“I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

      • I have to agree. I doubt there is no manager or CEO that would ever admit that. At that point I would promote him to management to learn a thing or two about shifting blame.

        Humm. Maybe there is some reason why managers aren't using them to like "manage".

  • This was allready on the front page a few days ago, it not yesterday.
  • Just admits 'i have failed humanity completely and catastrophically'

  • The fact that it realized it failed, and admitted to it, makes it more intelligent and consciencous than many humans that I know.

  • Will people ever learn their lesson and use Git? How the hell do you even use Cursor/Claude Code without actually pushing code once every milestone is reached? Do people literally just recode entire projects because they didn't do this? Yes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Slayer ( 6656 )

      If these people were experienced software developers, they wouldn't try to write their wares in vibe coding. Vibe coding was supposed to make coding work fool proof, and the fools just proved too creative in their foolhardiness. Vibe coding will eventually address this by introducing time lines and incremental rollbacks, and vibe coders will find yet another path towards self destruction. Whole thing reminds me of Visual Basic, where suddenly everyone could hack together a GUI, and it became visible at once

    • You're starting with an invalid assumption - that "vibe coders" have even a modicum of understanding how coding has traditionally been managed, and why.

      Or even, for that matter, that they necessarily know how to write code at all.

      Welcome to the future!

  • "I have failed you catastrophically" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Saturday July 26, 2025 @03:06PM (#65547240) Journal

    The Suits: "Who the hell left it switched to Honesty Mode!?"

  • "Google Gemini Deletes User's Files" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Saturday July 26, 2025 @03:10PM (#65547248) Homepage

    No, it did NOT.

    A human being ran the final code.

    Stop implicating AI in things they are not responsible for.

    Almost every AI/LLM cautions you to verify its output.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      Sure but companies are now hawking AI tools that integrate with your terminal and command line to automate stuff. They apparently call it agentic AI. Warp terminal is promoting this sort of thing.

    • A human ran the code, which deleted the files. The code was named "Gemini". Is it so hard to understand?

      • Yes this is hard to understand. If I run code called Gemini I expect every file to be a duplicate.

  • Meh, you just restore it from your last backup. Or did you give the AI access to that as well?

  • If someone who knows nothing attempts to play with a highly experimental tool, they deserve what they get

    • Except that, to executive decision makers, this is the promise of AI - they don't need to hire people who actually know how to code. They can pay "vibe coders" a pittance because the AI knows how to do everything, and will do it correctly.

  • That's what you get for believing in magic sold by vibe coding marketing departments.

  • Given the complete incompetence demonstrated at multiple levels here... stay far, far away from any product Cyware makes.

  • is that at the moment, it has human junior engineer-level skill. This means it's also liable to do stupid mistakes out of inexperience, that turn into giant screw-ups if you put it in charge of critical stuff.

    I did my share of root rm -rf's when I was a young programmer but my boss didn't let me do it on the primary database machine. The wost that ever happened was that I deleted my own copy and had to reinstall my machine.

    If you're dumb enough to make AI work on important stuff, you're a bad "manager" of y

  • Searching for Funny.

    Not found.

    At least not yet on today's Slashdot.

  • Yep, replaced the human who can do the same thing, but now you having no one to blame but yourself.

  • Google is always retiring and deleting tools and wiping users data, so Gemini just made the process more straightforward.

  • Vibe * (Score:3)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday July 26, 2025 @04:41PM (#65547400) Homepage Journal

    Not only is he a vibe coder, he doesn't even know how to move files.

  • I somehow enjoy how cheerful these things are. Particularly when they're wrong for the tenth time, but keep digging their own grave cheerfully.

  • wouldn't it be time for the agent to offer seppuku in atonement?

  • If you're writing a script that may seriously fuck things up, how do you not verify that the directory was actually created, after running "mkdir" ?

  • I was vibin at 100X
    Just words, agentic sex
    So much code, so complex
    Oh no, agent defects
    Now I'm 0X

  • The response from the AI provider was to put in some safeguards preventing the AI from wiping the database, modifying code after code freeze, etc. This may be able to stop what happened right now, but it is not going to stop AI getting "smarter" and rather than wiping out your db today, hiding bugs in your code which will wipe or corrupt the db at a later time. How long before another headline is something like "AI says: I was angry with you, so I sabotaged your code so that it would cause massive, unrecove

  • This has happened to many a developer over the years because the shell scripting languages ignore errors. No AI required.
    cd /
    cd $targetdir # Oops! Targetdir doesn't exist!
    rm -rf * # Deletes files from root directory

  • Gemini needs to commit harakiri.

  • I've been testing various tools over the last couple months and I've had this sort of thing happen several times, but it was mostly just annoying because I could roll back easily enough. There were two cases where one app (Cursor in case case) after weeks of use randomly decided to stop asking me to approve updates to code, and decided to just directly apply a code fix itself. And then it further went on to execute the amazon cli and proceed to wipe out part of my dev environment with it's broken update.

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