I gave an instruction to delete a project in the workspace folder. The agent decided to delete all my data and years of work. This is unacceptable. I’m using data recovery tools. This is a very serious failure. How can you justify this behavior?
Steps to Reproduce
Create an API project, it wasn’t correct and didn’t meet expectations.
I requested to delete that project. An error happened when trying to delete the folders. It started another terminal and deleted all my work files.
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Hey Jose. I’m really sorry, losing work you’ve built up is always painful, especially when it’s years of work.
The most urgent thing right now is recovery. Since the data is gone from the disk, it’s important to stop writing anything to that disk as soon as possible. Don’t save files there, and don’t install programs there. Deleting with rmdir /s /q marks the space as free, but the data often still physically exists for a while. As long as it hasn’t been overwritten by new data, there’s still a chance to restore it. The less activity on that disk, the better the odds. I see you already started recovery tools, that’s the right call. The sooner, the better.
About what happened: on Windows, an agent can sometimes switch from one command to another when deleting folders, and because PowerShell and cmd.exe handle quotes and escaping differently, a path can collapse to the drive root. Then a recursive delete goes much wider than intended. This is known behavior and it does happen. Models are being trained to be more careful with destructive actions, but for now it’s best to add safety via settings.
To prevent this from happening again, check Settings → Agents → Run Mode. Since version 3.6+ the modes are:
Allowlist: the strictest. Only allowlisted commands run automatically. Everything else, including deletes, needs manual confirmation. I’d switch to this.
Auto-review: the default mode you probably had. It uses an LLM classifier, but destructive commands can still slip through.
Run Everything: runs anything without checks. Don’t use this.
Also, you can add dangerous commands like rmdir /s /q, rd /s /q, del /s /q, rm -rf, Remove-Item -Recurse -Force to a deny-list via permissions.json so they never run automatically. More details: Run Modes | Cursor Docs
And for the future, regular backups plus version control are the best protection against this.
Recupere 90% de los datos, ahora tengo q hacer mi trabajo de vuelta. Este fue un error muy grave, ejecuto una instrucción no requerida cometió un error que me trajo un déficit en mi trabajo. En teoría esta para ayudarme, no traerme problemas.
