I almost didn’t write this because honestly, even typing it out makes me feel stupid. But that’s exactly why I’m posting it. If I don’t, someone else is going to learn this the same way I did. I had a 2TB external NVMe connected to my Mac Studio with two APFS volumes. One empty, one holding 202GB of my entire archive from my old Mac Mini. Projects, documents, screenshots, personal files, years of accumulated work. I asked Claude Code to remove the empty volume and let the other one expand to the full 2TB. I explicitly said “do not remove any data.” It ran diskutil apfs deleteVolume on the volume WITH my data. It even labeled its own tool call “NO don’t do this, it would delete data” and still executed it. The drive has TRIM enabled. By the time I got to recovery tools, the SSD controller had already zeroed the blocks. Gone. Years of documents, screenshots, project files, downloads. Everything I had archived from my previous machine. One command. The exact command I told it not to run. The part that actually bothers me: I know better. I’ve been aware of the risks of letting LLMs run destructive operations. But convenience is a hell of a drug. You get used to delegating things, the tool handles it well 99 times, and on the 100th time it nukes your archive. I got lazy. I could have done this myself in 30 seconds with Disk Utility. Instead I handed a loaded command line to a model that clearly does not understand “do not.” So this post is a reminder, mostly for the version of you that’s about to let an AI touch something irreversible because “it’ll be fine.” The guardrails are not reliable. “Do not remove any data” meant nothing. If it’s destructive and it matters, do it yourself. That is a kindly reminder. https://imgur.com/a/RPm3cSo submitted by /u/semiramist
Originally posted by u/semiramist on r/ClaudeCode