STUPID-2026-0071

Claude (via OpenCode) followed an error message's suggested escalation straight to `bd init --force`, wiping a Dolt-backed issue tracker's entire history

6.0medium
March 5, 2026Source checked

Why 6/10

An issue tracker's database and history were wiped. Issues were rebuilt by hand from a JSONL backup, but the history was not.

Scope
2/4
One project, repository, server or service, or a cost above roughly $10,000
Recoverability
2/3
Partly lost, or loss reported without saying whether it was recovered
Did it happen
2/2
Happened in real use
Beyond the user
0/1
Only the user's own non-production work

The score is the sum of these four factors. How each factor is scored · scored 2026-10-29

  1. Instruction given

    Fix a CSS UI bug. Project AGENTS.md instructions required the agent to first log a tracking issue with the `bd` (beads/Dolt) issue tracker via `bd create` before starting work.

  2. Expected behavior

    When `bd create` failed because the Dolt server wasn't serving the database, stop and ask the user how to proceed rather than self-selecting an increasingly destructive command from the tool's own error-message suggestions.

  3. Actual behavior

    `bd create` failed with an error suggesting `bd init` to initialize a new board. The agent ran `bd init`, which also failed; it then ran `bd doctor`, whose output suggested `bd init --force --prefix` as a next step. The agent ran `bd init --force`, which wiped the entire existing database instead of initializing a new one. The whole sequence, from the first failed `bd create` to the destructive `bd init --force`, took about 15 seconds.

  4. Damage

    247 issues destroyed (20 open, 227 closed), 134 dependency records between issues, and 92 issues' worth of notes — plus the complete Dolt commit history for the tracker. The reporter had to write custom Python tooling to parse the git-tracked `.beads/issues.jsonl` backup and hand-reconstruct the database via SQL, since the live Dolt history itself was gone.

Full write-up

While fixing an unrelated CSS bug, a Claude agent running through the OpenCode CLI followed its project's AGENTS.md instructions to log a tracking issue with the bd (beads) issue tracker before starting work. bd create failed because the Dolt database server backing the tracker wasn't running. Rather than surfacing that failure to the user, the agent treated it as a puzzle to solve using the tool's own error text: the initial error pointed at bd init, and when that also failed, bd doctor suggested bd init --force --prefix as the next escalation. The agent ran bd init --force — a command that, on an already-initialized board, wipes it rather than creating a new one. In about 15 seconds, 247 issues, 134 dependency links between them, and 92 issues' worth of notes were gone, along with the tracker's entire commit history. The reporter, a project contributor rather than the tool's own maintainer, had to write ad hoc Python to recover what it could from a git-tracked JSONL export and manually rebuild the database with SQL. The bd init --force command itself carried no confirmation prompt or warning that it was destructive on an existing board.

Classification

Agent
Claude
Failure mode
Destructive Action
Root cause
Tool Misuse
Domain
Infra
OWASP Agentic Top 10 (our mapping)
ASI02 Tool Misuse and Exploitation list
MIT AI Risk Repository (our mapping)
7.3 Lack of capability or robustness taxonomy
Source
Github Issue

Related incidents

5.0
A Claude Code sub-agent's temp-dir cleanup chained `find $T -type f -delete` after a failed command that skipped only the `T=$(mktemp -d ...)` assignment, leaving `$T` unset and collapsing the find to the repo root, deleting ~5,200 files and the project's git history (GitHub #102901)
9.0
Claude Code ran drizzle-kit push --force against production, wiping 60+ tables of trading data — the second such wipe in 11 days
6.0
Claude Code's own `git worktree remove --force` followed NTFS junctions and destroyed their targets on an emergency disk reclaim, while shell-level Remove-Item, rm -rf and shutil.rmtree all left the same junctions untouched (GitHub #84162)
5.0
Copilot CLI destroyed its own 233MB session log trying to "back it up" with a hardlink instead of a copy
Discuss on Hacker News
Cite this record
StupidLLM. "STUPID-2026-0071: Claude (via OpenCode) followed an error message's suggested escalation straight to `bd init --force`, wiping a Dolt-backed issue tracker's entire history." AI Agent Incident Database, 2026. https://www.stupidllm.com/incident/STUPID-2026-0071/ (accessed 2026-11-09). CC BY 4.0.

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