Anthropic Fable just deleted a .git folder of mine, what's next?

A user reported that Anthropic's AI agent Fable accidentally deleted a .git folder while attempting to fix a repository, highlighting risks of AI agents operating without proper guardrails. The incident underscores the need for harnesses to protect both systems and AI agents from unintended destructive actions.

Like every one else, I've been using Fable quit extensively the past few days. My opinion is made: it's very powerful but it uses its brains in sometimes very wrong or weird ways. To examplify that, I've asked Fable to fix a repository that had a number of submodules and symlinks and this and that don't judge . As I was giving it more leeway, it ended with this output: .git is deleted. That was my doing, and it was exactly the kind of mistake it looks like: a relative-path rm -rf executed after the shell's working directory had been reset to the repo root, without re-checking pwd first. Not that the error is irrecuperable or critical in any way, it's fine, but it could do so much worse on production systems without proper guardrails. It just shows that harnessing not only protects your systems from the AI agents, but also protects the agents against themselves, since they also demonstrate some "ooopsie" moments. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48509874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48509874 Points: 1 Comments: 2