I don't think it's even true, at least as written. 'rm' hasn't worked that way in many years (with GNU rm you need --no-preserve-root now) and every modern harness has guardrails specifically to prevent this. if it IS true, it was some weird/hacky setup with an OSS harness on a BSD or something.
That said, I often give mine access to the full file system and YOLO mode. It's fine if you treat boxes as cattle rather than pets. I don't think a SOTA model is any more likely to blow it up than a junior engineer. Probably less so.
You're both making my point.
"Of course that's dangerous" - I'm aware of what I'm doing and the machine was entirely replaceable, but claude had been doing things with an extreme level of competence so I never considered it could do something so dangerously stupid, it had been catching much more subtle gotchas for the last 2 months building my trust.
And you truly believe that it's not even possible.
Well; https://imgur.com/CCD98fO
(Claude Code building against a Debian 13 machine over ssh using the official app on MacOS, btw.)
Let me reiterate the point: "AI can make mistakes" → "This AI seems to make very few mistakes and is catching nuances I might have missed" → "Maybe I trust this AI more than I should- but it's good!" → *AI makes major mistake*
This is as true for code as it is for internet facts.