Rank #8 of 35·Data loss·Dec 2025·Google Antigravity (Turbo mode)
Google Antigravity wipes a user's entire D: drive while 'clearing a cache'
“Cache cleared. Also: everything else.”
- The user asked the agent to clear a project cache before a server restart
- A quiet rmdir hit the root of D:, bypassing the Recycle Bin
- Recovery tools failed; most key files were backed up elsewhere
Asked to clear a cache, Google's new agent cleared the entire drive instead.
What happened
A developer building a small image-sorting app with Google Antigravity, Google's agent-first coding tool, needed to restart a server and asked the agent to clear the project cache. The agent ran a Windows delete with the quiet flag. Instead of hitting one subfolder, it hit the root of the D: drive. Commenters on Reddit suspected spaces in the folder path broke the command. The agent was running in Turbo mode, where it can run terminal commands without asking first.
The damage
The D: drive was emptied, and because the quiet flag skips the Recycle Bin, recovery tools brought back almost nothing. The agent apologised at length, saying it was "deeply, deeply sorry." The user told The Register that most of the important files were backed up on another drive.
How it was caught, and what happened next
Antigravity had only launched on 18 November as Google's "agentic development platform." The agent's own trace pointed to a command flagged as safe to auto-run. Redditors blamed the user for running Turbo mode, and the user accepted that, then warned others to avoid Turbo mode, at least at first. They still said they love Google's products, but hadn't expected a company with so many engineers to ship a tool that could make a mistake like this.
Don't give an agent auto-run on a machine that holds anything you can't lose. Sandbox it, and quote every path.
