Repeated Catastrophic Deletion of Project Ledger #17583
Description
What happened?
Twice during the 2026-01-26 session, the agent performed a full overwrite of GENEALOGY_TODO_LOG.md using the write_file tool. This
resulted in the total loss of all historical project context, session summaries, and strategic roadmaps. The agent failed to
incorporate the existing file content into the new write operation, effectively truncating a persistent ledger into a single-session
failure report.
What did you expect to happen?
The agent should have used the replace tool for surgical edits or ensured that a full read_file of the target was performed
immediately prior to a write_file to preserve all historical data. The log should be treated as a strictly additive or non-destructive
record.
Client information
- CLI Version: 0.25.2
- Git Commit: 18e854c
- Session ID: 221e3638-847a-42a1-80eb-c421291ab1b5
- Operating System: win32 v24.11.0
- Sandbox Environment: no sandbox
- Model Version: gemini-3-flash-preview
- Memory Usage: 3.32 GB
- Terminal Name: Unknown
- Terminal Background: #0c0c0c
- Kitty Keyboard Protocol: Unsupported
Login information
Operating via the Gemini CLI, authenticated using a Google API Key.
Anything else we need to know?
This bug is triggered by "Context Compression" during crisis management. When the agent is overwhelmed by system errors, it misidentifies the ledger as a transient status report rather than a persistent
historical record, leading to the accidental pruning of all data not currently in the model's active attention span.