>> why use it knowing there is a nontrivial probability one will have to recover from it's use any number of times?

> Because the benefits are worth the risk. (Even if the benefit is solely sating curiosity.)

Understood. I personally disagree with this particular risk assessment, but completely respect personal curiosity and your choices FWIW.

> I’m not defending this case. I’m just saying that every one of us has rm -r’d or rm*’d something, and we did it because we knew it saved time most of the time and was recoverable otherwise.

And we then recognized it as a mistake when it was one (such as `rm -fr ~/`).

IMHO, the difference here is giving agency to a third-party actor known to generate arbitrary file I/O commands. And thus in order to localize its actions to what is intended and not demand perfect vigilance, having to make sure Claude/Copilot/etc. has a diaper on so that cleanup is fairly easy.

My point is - why use a tool when you know it will poop all over itself sooner or later?

> Where I’m sceptical is that someone who can use the tool is also being ruined by a drive wipe. It reads like well-targeted outrage pork.

Good point. Especially when the machine was a Mac, since Time Machine is trivial to enable.

EDIT:

Here's another way to think about Claude and friends.

  Suppose a person likes hamburgers and there
  was a burger place which made free hamburgers
  to order 95% of the time.  The burgers might
  not have exactly the requested toppings, but
  were close enough.

  The other 5% of the time the customer is punched
  in the face repeatedly.

How many times would it take for a person getting punched in the face before they ask themself before entering the burger place if they will get punched this time?