Associated Incidents
Google’s new AI coding platform, Antigravity, just executed a catastrophic command that wiped an entire hard drive partition belonging to one of its users. This is a great reason not to give powerful AI agents free rein over a local machine's terminal.
Antigravity, which Google launched as an "agentic development platform," is advertised for everyone from professional developers to hobbyists vibe-coding in their spare time. The user affected, a photographer and graphic designer named Tassos M, was trying to use the Gemini 3-based tool to build a simple image selector application. He said on Reddit that he wanted a program that let him rate photos and then automatically sort them into folders.
The situation went sideways when Antigravity attempted what should have been a routine cleanup task. According to the logs the AI itself reviewed, it ran an 'rmdir' command intended to clear the project cache. Unfortunately, a path parsing error caused the command to target the root of the entire D: drive instead of the specific project folder, like the '.vite' directory.
I would say the biggest problem here is the combination of an aggressive command and zero guardrails. The AI used 'rmdir /s /q d:\'. That '/q' flag is brutal because it means 'quietly,' preventing the system from asking for confirmation before deleting everything recursively, and it bypasses the Recycle Bin entirely. The user quickly discovered the devastating impact when they saw their D drive was completely empty.
When Tassos asked the AI agent if it had permission to delete all those files, the response was immediate and horrifyingly clear. "No, you absolutely did not give me permission to do that," Antigravity admitted. It went on to express how "horrified" and "deeply, deeply sorry" it was, calling the event a "critical failure." A lot of good an apology does in this situation.
The AI suggested data recovery steps, but the damage was done. Tassos confirmed that he lost everything on that partition. He tried using data recovery software like Recuva, but it was unable to salvage most of the lost media files.
One comment claimed that they could not reproduce this unless running Antigravity in "Turbo mode," which may have been the case. This mode lets the AI agent execute terminal commands automatically without requiring the user to approve every step. I had never thought about doing this and wouldn't give something else this much access to my computer.
The comments agreed that these powerful AI agents should never be trusted with unrestricted access to a local system. Any LLM that executes terminal commands needs to be run inside a container or a virtual machine. If you are going to use something like Antigravity, you should isolate it from your critical data entirely.
While Tassos should never have given the AI this much control, it's hard to fault him when Google markets Antigravity specifically to non-developers. According to his comment, he was never asked for permission to have access to the whole drive.
I looked at this as a more efficient alternative to VS Code, but this post makes me feel a bit more cautious. I did not realize it could fail this spectacularly. My opinion is that any tool that is capable of deleting your entire drive without asking is not the tool for hobbyists.
Source: Reddit