Stories of AI agents running amok and following instructions literally, creatively, or a surprising mix of both are becoming common. In the case of developer Sebastien Guillemot, Claude ran an exceedingly effective cleanup operation: The bot managed to free 700 GB of disk space, but it was in the form of Guillemot's entire data folder and one week's worth of work, and it occurred after the model was automatically downgraded due to security concerns.
The developer frequently uses AI agents, and became a bit annoyed that a lot of them didn't clean up after themselves, leaving copious amounts of junk behind in the /tmp directory. Proving the old adage that once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, Guillemot asked Claude Fable to write a script that would sandbox each agent under its own folder in /tmp and run a cleanup after they were done. The main problem, naturally, was not deleting files that were actually in use.
