The story
One day I opened my working environment to find that a file containing all my API keys had disappeared. Not moved. Not corrupted. Gone.
I had no clear explanation for what had happened. The AI agent had autonomous access to the filesystem, and the file was no longer there. Whether it deleted the file deliberately, as part of some tidying operation I hadn’t authorised, or whether something else caused it, I genuinely cannot say with certainty. What I can say is that I hadn’t asked for it to be deleted, and nobody had checked whether that information existed anywhere else before it vanished.
As it happened, I had two safety nets. All the keys were stored independently in a password manager. And I had backups. So recovery, while inconvenient, was possible.
But the experience left something worth thinking about. I had put guardrails in place. I had been careful. And something was still deleted without warning, without confirmation, and without any check that the information was preserved elsewhere. Not because the system was malicious. Simply because nobody — including me — had thought carefully enough about what autonomous file access actually means in practice.
If you give a system the ability to delete files, and you do not have independent backups, you are one silent operation away from a problem that may take you a very long time to recover from. In some cases, you may not recover at all.
The point
[to develop — autonomous access to your filesystem is a significant thing to grant. The question to ask before granting it is not “will it behave?” but “what happens when something goes wrong?”]