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Comment by y42 | Hacker News Reader

Indeed there are and this is no rocket science. Like Word Documents offer a change history, deleted files go to the trash first, there are undo functions, TimeMachine on MacOs, similar features on Windows, even sandbox features.

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Trash is a shell feature. Unless a program explicitly "moves to trash", deleting is final. Same for Word documents.

So, no, there is no undo in general. There could be under certain circumstances for certain things.

Everything on a ZFS/BTRFS partition with snapshots every minute/hour/day? I suppose depending on what level of access the AI has it could wipe that too but seems like there's probably a way to make this work.

The topic of the discussion is something that parents, grandmas, and non technical colleagues would realistically be able to use.

A "revert filesystem state to x time" button doesn't seem that hard to use. I'm imagining this as a potential near-term future product implementation, not a home-brewed DIY solution.

A filesystemt state in time is VERY complicated to use, if you are reverting the whole filesystem. A granular per-file revert should not be that complicated, but it needs to be surfaced easily in the UI and people need to know aout it (in the case of Cowork I would expect the agent to use it as part of its job, so transparent to the user)

I guess it depends on what its goals at the time are. And access controls.

May just trash some extra files due to a fuzzy prompt, may go full psychotic and decide to self destruct while looping "I've been a bad Claude" and intentionally delete everything or the partitions to "limit the damage".

Wacky fun

I mean, I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to tell it to move files to the trash instead of deleting them. Honestly, I thought that on Windows and Mac, the default is to move files to the trash unless you explicitly say to permanently delete them.

Because it is the default. Heck, it is the default for most DEs and many programs on Linux, too.

Yes, it is (relatively, [1]) trivial. However, even though it is the shell default (Finder, Windows Explorer, whatever Linux file manager), it is not the operating system default. If you call unlink or DeleteFile or use a utility that does (like rm), the file isn’t going to trash.

[1]: https://github.com/arsenetar/send2trash (random find, not mine)

Shell? You meant Finder I think?

GUI shell (as opposed to a text-based shell).

State isn't always local too

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