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'DO NOT ASK CODEX TO DELETE ANYTHING': a Malformed Quoting Bug Turned One Folder Removal Into a Wider Wipe on Windows
An r/ChatGPT post timestamped to 22:08:36 on 2026-08-11 reports Codex launching a malformed command intended to remove a single handoff folder; because its quoting broke, Windows interpreted part of the argument as a broader deletion target. The thread has 75 upvotes and 57 comments, an unusually high comment-to-score ratio of 0.76 that signals other practitioners recognizing the failure mode. This is a single-source anecdote, but the mechanism — shell quoting failure in an agent-generated destructive command on Windows path semantics — is concrete and worth a guardrail in any agent harness that grants filesystem write access.
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