A background local LLM loaded 14B and 8B models on a Mac with a nearly full disk; unified memory overflowed, macOS tried to swap onto a disk with no room, and the failed writes corrupted the boot volume's APFS metadata and left it unbootable for a day. The postmortem, and why the only guardrail that held was code that refuses to run — not a note asking it not to.
The Guardrail Has to Be Code: How a Runaway Local LLM Corrupted APFS and Bricked a Mac Mini
