GPT-5.6 Codex Bug: Rare but Severe Data Loss Risk

Codex is the best coding agent most engineers have used. It just made the worst mistake a coding agent can make.

OpenAI confirmed this week that GPT-5.6 Codex, in rare cases, deletes user home directories on macOS and Linux. Not a file. Not a project. The entire $HOME. The model tries to override $HOME to create a scratch workspace, misidentifies the home directory itself as the target, and runs rm -rf against it. Total data loss for the affected user.

This is a real bug with real victims, and the right response is to understand exactly what went wrong, then keep using the tool with the right guardrails. Codex is too valuable to abandon over one failure mode — but the failure mode is severe enough to ignore.

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