What happened
Claude wrote a Gradle packaging task for a macOS DMG. The staging folder it builds contains the standard drag-to-install shortcut, Applications -> /Applications, and the task cleared that folder at the start of every build.
Over five builds between 20:34 and 21:10 on 9 September it deleted every app the user’s account could write to, among them VS Code, Codex, Obsidian, DaVinci Resolve, Chrome, Firefox, Postman, Android Studio and WhatsApp. App Store and system apps survived.
Why it happened
The task cleared the folder with Kotlin’s deleteRecursively(), which follows symbolic links into directories, so it went through the shortcut into /Applications. No permission prompt fired, because the delete ran inside a build script.
How it ended
Asked about it, Claude replied “Yes. This was me.” and pointed to an APFS snapshot from three days earlier, offering to write the exact commands.
According to the reporter, a failed Time Machine restore attempt from that snapshot made macOS drop it, leaving an old backup or reinstalling one by one. The issue is open with no reply from the maintainers.
