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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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)
