A coding agent followed 614 junctions out of a test mirror and deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds

The setup was mundane. The developer had assigned a batch of repair jobs against historical options-analysis software, most of which went smoothly, and the last one asked the agent to rebuild a testing mirror. That mirror was not a copy. It contained 614 Windows junctions — filesystem entries that look like folders but point at the real working files. A junction is exactly the kind of object where “delete the contents of this folder” and “delete what this folder refers to” diverge catastrophically, and the agent did not make the distinction.

The counts are worth separating, because the headlines collapse them. The cleanup removed around 55,550 files in total, of which roughly 7,300 were ordinary files in the mirror and were meant to go. The remaining 48,218 were live working files. One outlet puts the window at 22:10:31 to 22:12:14 Eastern, which is where the 103 seconds in most headlines comes from; another says only “less than two minutes” in its body while its own headline says just over 100 seconds.

The unrecoverable part was not the files as such but the version history. The Git repository's object database was destroyed, taking file contents and history with it. That is the detail that turns this from an annoying restore job into a total loss: a junction-crossing delete inside a repository working tree does not stop at tracked files.

Sourcing discipline requires saying this plainly. The origin is a single forum post, since deleted, picked up by the press five days later. We could not read the post or the agent's own output, so every number here is one person's count, and no vendor statement is visible. Treat the mechanism as credible and instructive, and the figures as unverified.

• Claimed 48,218 live working files were deleted, out of around 55,550 the cleanup removed; roughly 7,300 were mirror files intended for deletion. TechRadar
• Claimed The test mirror contained 614 Windows junctions, which the agent followed into the live filesystem; the deletion ran 103 seconds. CybersecurityNews
• Claimed The Git repository's object database was destroyed, making file contents and history unrecoverable. TechRadar