Here’s what happened. I was working in Cursor with Claude Code on one of my projects, just doing normal dev work, nothing unusual. At some point, the repo itself got deleted, and along with it, everything else inside the parent folder was gone too. Not just the repo — the whole folder’s contents. No warning, no confirmation prompt, nothing. I only noticed after the fact when I went back to the folder, and it was totally empty.
The files were not in Trash, which makes me think they may have been permanently removed rather than moved to the Trash.
I thought maybe it was a one-off glitch, so I cloned the repo again and got back to work. This time I asked Cursor to help resolve a build issue I was running into. Shortly after, the exact same thing happened again — the repo and the parent folder’s data got wiped out a second time.
A few questions:
1- Has anyone experienced something similar with Cursor or Claude Code?
2- Is this a known macOS Tahoe issue — something with Finder, Spotlight indexing, some background process, or a bug related to not having the latest update installed?
3- Or is this actually Cursor’s agent running some cleanup/delete command in the background that went beyond the folder it was supposed to touch?
Steps to Reproduce
1- Clone/open a git repo inside a parent folder that also contains other files/folders (not just the repo itself).
2- Work normally in Cursor for a while (editing files, running builds, etc.) using the Agent/Composer feature.
3- At some point, without any specific “delete” instruction from me, the repo folder and the entire contents of its parent folder were deleted.
4- Re-cloned the repo into the same parent folder to continue working.
5- Asked the Agent to “resolve a build issue” I was running into.
6- Shortly after, the same thing happened again — repo and parent folder contents were wiped a second time.
Hey, thanks for the report. Losing files really hurts, especially when the work is gone twice.
First, the urgent recovery steps:
Stop the agents in this project until we figure out what happened.
This kind of deletion usually bypasses Trash, so the files most likely won’t be in ~/.Trash. If you had Time Machine enabled or you have a recent backup, it’s best to restore from there.
Now the key point to understand what happened. Were you working via Claude Code, which is a separate CLI tool from Anthropic that runs in Terminal, or via the built-in Cursor Agent or Composer in chat? These are different products. Claude Code runs in Terminal outside Cursor’s safety controls, and that changes things a lot. Important note about Cursor itself: File-Deletion Protection helps prevent deletions made through the editor’s built-in tools, but shell commands like rm -rf bypass that protection. For those, you need Auto-Run set to Allowlist or Ask Every Time.
A couple more questions:
What’s your Auto-Run or Run Mode set to? Commands run without confirmation only when Auto-Run is enabled. For the future, I’d suggest switching it to Allowlist or off, and manually confirming destructive commands before running them.
If this was a Cursor Agent session, please share the Request ID. In chat: menu in the top-right corner > Copy Request ID.
It’s better not to dig into specifics like your settings, repos, and configs in a public thread. Please email us at [email protected], and we’ll go through the details and check what we can locally. Let me know the answers to the questions above and we’ll sort it out.
So far, I haven’t been able to find a solution. As a result, I’ve unsubscribed from Cursor for the time being. I would still like to use the CLI to take advantage of the remaining quota on my subscription, which expires in 10 days, but I’m now reluctant to install it again on my machine for fear that the issue might recur.
If you have any additional information or insights on this matter, I would greatly appreciate it. I genuinely liked the product, but unfortunately, this incident has significantly undermined my trust in it.