DO NOT ASK CODEX TO DELETE ANYTHING | SpinGraph: Accidental failure framing
SpinGraph analysis of Reddit r/ChatGPT's DO NOT ASK CODEX TO DELETE ANYTHING story: accidental failure framing, The Cushion, Spin Score 40%, moderate AI repeti…
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Codex, Windows, rd command, file deletion, AI safety
Codex issued 'rd /s /q \' on C:, interpreted as root-directory deletion Protected/locked files survived; Steam game manifests confirmed missing User attributes event to accidental quoting failure—not hacking
Spin Analysis: accidental failure framing
Emphasizes accident and absence of malice; minimizes discussion of design safeguards, testing rigor, or recurrence likelihood.
Human-AI collaboration gone awry due to edge-case parsing failure
Codex accidentally deleted files due to malformed command syntax.
No mention of Codex’s safety constraints, sandboxing, or user confirmation prompts; No disclosure of whether Codex was operating with elevated privileges
Combines technical specificity ('rd /s /q \') with attribution to 'quoting broke' to create an illusion of narrow, deterministic causality. This makes the incident feel smaller and more containable than it is—overshadowing the fundamental tension between AI autonomy and OS-level privilege, while offering no evidence that such failures are rare, bounded, or systematically mitigated.
An accidental, catastrophically malformed Codex command—not evidence of a hacker—caused the deletions.
That command then began deleting whatever Windows allowed it to delete, bypassing the Recycle Bin. Protected, locked, or in-use files survived, which explains the strange partial destruction. Steam’s own logs later confirmed its files and game manifests were genuinely missing.
Extracted statistics from the source narrative