Source: Reddit Post.
Claude CLI deleted my entire home directory! Wiped my whole mac.
I was having the Claude CLI clean up my packages in an old repo, and it nuked my whole Mac! What the hell? Has anyone ever had this happen? I’m trying to figure out if this is even reversible. So much work lost…
CLAUDE response - I found the problem and it’s really bad. Looking at your log, here’s the catastrophic command that was run:
bash
rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/
See that ~/ at the end? That’s your entire home directory. The Claude Code instance accidentally included ~/ in the deletion command, which would wipe out:
- Your entire Desktop (~/Desktop)
- Documents, Downloads, everything
- Your Keychain (~/Library/Keychains)
- Claude credentials (~/.claude)
- Application support data
- Basically everything in /Users/…
This explains why:
- Your desktop is gone
- Your keychain was deleted
- Your Claude credentials disappeared
- The error at the end says “current working directory was deleted”
Simple answer to a reasonable question:
Workplaces (mine included) demand use of the tool, but thier IT policies have end users boxed-in to how it can be accessed.
I HOPE people start nuking thier machines. I’d love it if our terrible development environments were viewed as what was holding gen ai back by management. They certainly didn’t fucking care that it was holding developers back.
If we get a sane dev environment as a byproduct of copilot, that’s realistically the most tangible win we can expect from Gen ai