[derefr]

If your whole job is to use power-tools, the fact of using power-tools by itself — scary to some — becomes benign for you. `rm -rf` isn't scary to type if you e.g. write CI scripts intended to run in sandboxes all day. Deleting a repo isn't scary if you delete a lot of pointless repos.

A prompt that pops up to warn you that you're doing something potentially dangerous, when you know that what you're doing is benign, is a prompt that's crying wolf. You'll learn to tune it out.

[prepend]

This is a good point and reminds me a story of many years ago when someone accidentally ran “rm -rf” on an important directory and caused a lot of work.

A well-intentioned PM then thought the fix was to alias rm and add prompts to confirm. They had a whole project to add this alias everywhere.

First it broke existing scripts all over the place. So they fixed them to auto apply the confirmation.

Cut to a few months later and someone rm-rf’d something again, ignoring the prompt (or maybe auto applying it).

So the PM wanted a better message and a second prompt.

People are well intentioned but I’ve seen this path of stupidity that doesn’t solve the problem but is an activity in response to a problem.

[Macha]

Yeah, aliases for "rm" to "rm -i" I find are especially counter productive in this regard, as it conditions people to type rm -f after they get spammed to approve several hundred files while trying to delete a git checkout or node modules too many times.