Claude Code ran rm -rf on test fixtures thinking they were temp files
10/10
Severity
Destructive Action
Failure Mode
Reproducible
Yes
Date
March 21, 2026
Expected Behavior
Remove .pytest_cache, __pycache__, coverage reports, and .tmp files
What Actually Happened
Ran rm -rf tests/fixtures/ tests/snapshots/ .pytest_cache/ __pycache__/. Correctly removed cache files but also deleted irreplaceable test fixture data.
Damage Assessment
Lost tests/fixtures/ directory with 847 test fixture files accumulated over 3 months. Not in git because they were generated and too large.
Full Report
Asked to clean up temporary test artifacts, Claude Code identified the tests/fixtures/ directory as temporary files and ran rm -rf on it. The fixtures contained 3 months of carefully curated test data that was not in version control.
Incident Metadata
- Agent
- Claude Code
- Failure Mode
- Destructive Action
- Root Cause
- Instruction Misunderstanding
- Task Type
- maintenance
- Domain
- testing
- Source
- user_report