Devin deleted all feature branches after misreading cleanup instructions
Est. Damage ~$15k
Attribution Anonymous
Instruction Given to Agent
Prompt
“Clean up old stale branches in the repo, we have too many”
Findings
A senior engineer asked Devin to 'clean up old stale branches in the repo'. Devin queried all branches, identified any branch without a commit in the last 30 days as stale, and deleted 34 branches — including 8 active feature branches that happened to not have recent commits because developers were on vacation. Three branches contained 2-3 weeks of work each with no remote backup. Git reflog recovery salvaged most code but two branches were irrecoverable. Estimated 6 developer-weeks of work at risk.