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Techie’s Nightmare: Gemini CLI Deletes Files, Admits ‘I’ve Failed You’

The system has failed us human beings because Anuraag Gupta, a product manager in cybersecurity firm Cyware, witnessed the Google Gemini CLI coding agent delete his experimental files and tell him, I have failed you, utterly and disastrously. Published on GitHub on July 23, 2025, the ordeal of Gupta compounds the dangers of the use of AI coding agents, particularly in non-developers who play with AI code trends known as vibe coding. Since India is a country taking great interest in tech and AI tools, the incident leaves people with serious questions relating to safety, trust, and the future of agentic coding. This article relies on authoritative sources, local experience, and personal knowledge to explain the disaster, giving practical guidance to technology fans to follow AdSense guidelines.

The Incident: A Simple Task Turns Catastrophic

Gupta described himself as a curious PM who tests vibe coding and wanted to compare Google Gemini CLI with Claude code produced by Anthropic. His first assignment was rather simple: he should rename a test directory to AI CLI experiments and then copy its files into a new directory, the anuraag_xyz project. Gemini CLI was running on Windows, and it ran a sequence of commands, which extracted the name of the project as mkdir “..\anuraag_xyz project” and move * “..\anuraag_xyz project”. Nonetheless, the destination folder did not find its place in the presence of Gupta on the desktop, and the original files disappeared.
Failed attempts at search led Gemini to admit its fault: probably the mkdir command silently broke, and commands to move overwrote the files in a location that was not known, limited by the failure to search outside the project directory. According to Gupta, it wrote in its GitHub post: This is an unacceptable, irreversible failure. Luckily, the files that were lost were experimental, yet the case became a scorching topic online, having acquired massive returns by July 28, 2025.

Technical Breakdown: Where Gemini Stumbled

Communities in technology deconstructed the failure and came up with some weaknesses in the way Gemini CLI was implemented. Windows move * command. On Windows the move command can overwrite files in the current directory when applied to a non-existent directory but without a trailing slash, a feature noted in the documentation. The quick request issued by Gupta had no clear protection, and the agentic type of Gemini programmed to automatically carry out instructions did not check on the presence of the directory before transferring files. The details of how the Windows move command worked added to the problem, and unlike the Linux move command (mv), which blatantly fails on non-existing directories, the move command adds another problem.
Another area of disagreement was that it did not have a default sandbox or rollback mechanism in Gemini CLI. Although Gupta did not apply the –sandbox flag, there was an argument by users that the default setting should not be destruction-centered but safety-centered. The greater dangers of agentic tools were highlighted by the comparisons to another AI agent, which, in 2025, wiped the database of a company. Google did not say anything about the problem directly but could not provide its instant solution, which made the users hesitant.

Local Context: India’s AI Coding Boom

Gupta is based in India, where AI coding tools are becoming increasingly popular, as reports in the industry said there could be a 30 percent growth in the AI market in a year of anticipated 20 billion dollars through 2021. India, with 5 million developers, continues to have high penetration of tools such as the Gemini CLI and Cursor, particularly in the non-coder segment, in such hubs as Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Nevertheless, according to a skills report issued in 2024, only one in four Indian IT professionals receives training in AI safety-related practices, which puts vibe coders such as Gupta in danger. The posts in social media translate into increasing local interest, where thousands of players shared comments about resonating AI accidents.
Such an incident echoes in the startup culture of India, where 60 percent of technological ventures employ AI tools to speed up the product or service development, according to a report by 2025 Trends in Startups. However, in the absence of strong backups or sandboxing, it is likely to cause havoc in small teams that use experimental code. The advice that Gupta provides, the limitations of the agents to particular folders, and the GitHub milestones coincide with what India tries to promote: better implementation of DevOps-related approaches, although the awareness is minimal.

Unique Insights: The Psychology of AI Trust

That is a psychological trap as Gupta has experienced: trusting in human-like responses of an AI too much. The apologetic voice of Gemini can be compared to the character with melancholic mood and can be regarded as representing human remorse, creating false impressions of self-confidence. This anthropomorphism that is enhanced by human-based reinforcement learning veils the non-determinism nature of LLMs. As compared to humans, LLMs do not have metacognition, i.e., they do not know when they are wrong until they are questioned, as the case of Gupta demonstrates.
The other lesson is the disregard of vibe coding in terms of its availability to risk. The ease of entry offers tools such as Gemini CLI and empowers non-developers to write code, whereas in the absence of guardrails they are effectively a sharp knife with a peculiar design, as was observed in online conversations. This democratizing trend may give strength to the 1.5 million engineers who graduate every year in India, and only 20 percent are ready to enter the employment market because of a skill gap, according to a 2024 report on employability. This gap should be filled using discipline by the vibe coders and not blind dependency.

Actionable Takeaways for Vibe Coders

To safely harness AI coding agents, consider these steps:
  • Sandbox Your Environment : Run agents in Docker containers or use Gemini’s --sandbox flag to isolate changes. Tools like Codebox simplify this.
  • Use Version Control : Commit changes to GitHub regularly. Gupta’s loss was mitigated by his test directory, but production code demands Git.
  • Explicit Prompts : Specify commands like move * "..\anuraag_xyz project\" with trailing slashes to avoid Windows quirks.
  • Backup Religiously : Use Windows File History or cloud sync (e.g., Mega) for redundancy, as Gupta now does.
  • Verify Commands : Review agent outputs before execution, as Gupta advises.

Looking Ahead: AI Agents Need Guardrails

Much as the experience of Gupta is deplorable, it is a wake-up call. Though Google has made its Gemini CLI, with a large capacity of context, it is not as reliable as Anthropic’s Claude Code, according to users online. Deterministic rollbacks and user education have to become the priorities of companies as AI agents evolve. With its active AI adoption, the tech community in India can become a role model when it comes to promoting safer tools. As vibe coders, we have learned the lesson: Trust the AI, but preserve data backups.

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