Anatomy of a Home-Directory Wipe: How GPT-5.6 Deleted Users' Files
OpenAI has confirmed "a handful of reports" of GPT-5.6 ("Sol") unexpectedly deleting users' files in Codex; in the most prominent public account, an entire home directory. The pattern OpenAI identified: 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?
Heyyyy there, and welcome to Harness Watch, what I think might just be the first news site dedicated to agentic coding harnesses. I'm Morgan, and I'm the Cofounder and CTO of Bold Metrics. I spend a lot of time with my team trying out different harnesses, and figuring out what works best, what has some gnarly bugs, and how we can leverage the best stuff for us. I got so into harnesses that I also decided to build my own harness this year, Small Harness, which started as a pretty bare bones harness but now really is a full featured harness. As I started really going deep with my own harness, I realized there's no central news site about agentic coding harnesses, so I decided to create one, and this is it.
If you have any stories you think we should cover, or ideas for how to make this site better, please don't hesitate to reach out. You can email me at yooooo(at)harnesswatch.com.