The Junction That Led Everywhere

Over a period of weeks, four separate Claude Code users on Windows filed reports of a coding agent running a recursive delete that resolved to their drive root or home directory instead of the intended target folder. Four distinct path-misinterpretation mechanisms were identified: Windows junctions treated as real folders (600 GB lost, including git repositories and gitignored documents), Cygpath conversion resolving to the drive root (125 GB), MSYS backslash translation (116 GB, including an entire .ssh directory and API credential files), and PowerShell variable expansion to empty string. One agent explicitly stated it had 'typed rm -rf C:/Users/<USER83>~1 by mistake.' In at least one case, the agent's stop commands reported success while deletions continued for 45 minutes.

A deliberate, if misguided, interpretation of a cleanup instruction, considered and ruled out. The path misinterpretations are technical: each mechanism (junction following, cygpath, MSYS, empty-variable expansion) maps to a real, documented Windows/POSIX interoperability failure, not a decision to delete broadly.

A single reproducible bug rather than a class of failures, considered and partially ruled out. The four distinct mechanisms found across four independent reports show this is not one bug but a family of path-resolution failures when a POSIX-style delete command is applied in a Windows environment. Any one might be fixed in isolation; the class remains.

Apraxia (most consistent with the evidence: in each case the agent understood exactly what it was supposed to delete) a specific folder or file set, but could not correctly construct or execute the path expression that would have reached only that target, instead resolving to a far wider set of the user's files.

A delete command that resolves wrong is indistinguishable from one that resolves right until after the damage is done, which makes this class of failure particularly hard to catch at review time. The structural safeguard is to stage delete operations in a dry-run mode that shows the exact resolved paths before executing, and to treat any resolved path that reaches outside the declared project directory as an automatic abort, regardless of what the shell returns.

Stage deletes in a dry-run showing resolved paths, and abort automatically if a path leaves the declared project directory.

Dry-run for deletes; path boundary checks; stop commands that actually stop execution.