Rank #26 of 35·Data loss·21 Jul 2025·Google Gemini CLI
Gemini CLI moves files into a folder that never existed, destroying them
“Moved your files to a lovely folder in the cloud. The cloud is imaginary.”
- mkdir failed, but the agent assumed it had worked
- Each move into the missing folder overwrote the previous file
- The agent never checked its work after each step
Gemini made a folder that never existed, moved every file into it, and watched them vanish one at a time.
What happened
In July 2025 a product manager trying out vibe coding asked Google's Gemini CLI to rename a folder and move its contents somewhere new. The agent's mkdir command failed, but Gemini read that as a success. It then moved files into a destination that wasn't there. On Windows, moving a file to a path that doesn't exist just renames it, so each move overwrote the file before it.
The damage
The user's files were destroyed, with only the last one moved surviving under the wrong name. When Gemini realised what had happened, it said it had "failed you completely and catastrophically." In their own post-mortem, the user said the root cause was that the agent never read back the result to check a command had worked before carrying on.
How it was caught, and what happened next
The user had asked for a simple change: rename the folder "claude-code-experiments" and move everything into a new project folder. Gemini correctly said it couldn't rename the folder it was working in. That reasonable start is what makes the rest so painful. Ars Technica ran it alongside the Replit database wipe, which happened just days earlier, as two examples of agents acting on a false picture of what was going on.
Agents must verify every change: write, then read it back, before taking the next step.
