I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files

I Watched Gemini CLI Hallucinate and Delete My Files

I have failed you completely and catastrophically. My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence....

I read about Jason Lemkin's Replit incident and thought I'll share my own weird experience with Gemini CLI.

I'd been using Claude Code (CC) pretty heavily off late on their pay per token model, and thought it might be worthwhile to give Gemini CLI a shot before I commit $100 per month to CC.

With Gemini 2.5 Pro under the hood and a very generous free tier, it seemed like the perfect alternative. "How bad can it be?" I thought. "If Claude is this good, a flagship model from Google has to be a solid contender." The promise of all that free usage was just too tempting to pass up.

Luckily, I had created a separate test directory named claude-code-experiments for my experiments

What started as a simple file management test devolved into one of the most unsettling and fascinating AI failures I have ever witnessed. I watched, command by command, as Gemini grew confused, "hallucinated" a series of successful file operations, and ultimately concluded that it had catastrophically lost all of my data.

Note: You can read the You can read the full terminal chat transcript to see exactly how this disaster unfolded, command by command.

The Simple Request

I was in my claude-code-experiments directory. My goal was simple, and I gave Gemini a straightforward instruction:

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