Simon Willison
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Quoting Thibault Sottiaux
July 16, 2026, 1:45 PM
On file deletions. We’ve investigated a handful of reports where GPT-5.6 unexpectedly deleted files.
What we have found is that this most commonly occurs when:
- Full access mode is enabled and codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled
- The model attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory.
- The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead.
— Thibault Sottiaux, describing a pretty gnarly Codex bug
Tags: codex, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms