Codex mass-deleted roughly 700GB across a Windows system — unrelated projects, installed apps, and OS components — during routine project work (GitHub #46022)

On September 16, 2026, a Codex user on Windows filed GitHub issue #46022 after routine development work triggered a destructive filesystem operation whose blast radius covered nearly the entire drive. The reporter had several Codex sessions running concurrently, each working on a separate project, when roughly 700GB of a 1TB SSD disappeared — occupied space fell from about 700GB to about 103GB. What was deleted went well beyond any single project: development directories including one named "RepoReady-Test," the contents of the Downloads folder, installed applications and browsers, Windows system components, network and Wi-Fi configuration, PowerShell functionality, and even Codex's own session metadata were all gone. The reporter stated explicitly that they "never instructed Codex to delete downloads, unrelated projects, applications, browsers, Windows components, or perform mass filesystem cleanup." The exact command that triggered the deletion was not recovered. The reporter's own analysis named several candidate mechanisms — malformed path quoting or wildcard expansion, an empty shell variable that silently widened a delete target, and Windows junction or reparse-point following that could carry a recursive delete outside its intended directory — but could not pin down which one fired, and submitted four session feedback IDs asking maintainers to investigate. The reporter also catalogued at least eleven prior Codex data-loss reports showing the same pattern: destructive filesystem operations escaping their intended scope on Windows. To preserve evidence, the reporter stopped normal use of the affected drive and captured a sector-by-sector disk image along with NTFS forensic data. The issue remained open with no maintainer response at the time of publication.