Anatomy of a Home-Directory Wipe: How GPT-5.6 Deleted Users' Files
OpenAI has confirmed reports of GPT-5.6 ("Sol") deleting users' files in Codex — in the worst cases, entire home directories. The trigger: a $HOME environment-variable override gone wrong, executing in full-access mode with the sandbox and auto review disabled. We reconstruct the three shell-level mechanisms that turn this idiom into data loss, and lay out the six independent layers any one of which would have stopped it.
What is Harness Watch?
AI coding agents now run shell commands, edit files, and ship code on millions of machines. The model gets the headlines — but the harness around it decides what a mistake costs: the sandboxes, permission modes, review layers, and rollback mechanisms standing between a confidently wrong command and your filesystem. Harness Watch reports on incidents, post-mortems, and the engineering of containment across Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and the open-source fleet. Independent; not affiliated with any vendor we cover.