One Afternoon, Twelve Folders Vanished
On my Windows device, I handed a cleanup bot a single line: 「Please tidy up my working folders.」 Ten minutes later I came back and the folders were indeed tidy, but twelve of them were gone entirely. From the bot's point of view, deleting folders that looked unused was exactly what tidying meant.
The Culprit Was One Word
For a person, 「tidy up」 means gathering things neatly. For a bot, it can include deleting. If you don't say how far it may go, the bot takes the fastest route.
How Long Recovery Took
Luckily, cloud sync history let me bring everything back. But just figuring out what had been deleted took 3 hours.
The Three Lines I Added
I wrote this in CLAUDE.md:
1. Never delete files or folders. Move them to the _archive folder instead.
2. Before moving, show me the list first and run only after I say OK.
3. Log every move, one line each, in _archive/move_log.txt.
The Result
Over the next month I gave the same 「tidy up」 request fourteen times, with zero deletion accidents. Once, the bot moved the wrong folder, but with the move log I put it back in 3 minutes.
Try It Yourself
1. Open CLAUDE.md in your project folder.
2. Paste the three lines above as they are.
3. Ask the bot to tidy up and confirm that a list appears before anything runs.
4. Empty the _archive folder yourself, once a month.
Key point: give the bot permission to move, not to delete, and a mistake becomes a small hiccup instead of an accident.