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Why coding.sh is local-first

Agent sessions hold your prompts, your code and sometimes your keys, so coding.sh keeps them on your machine unless you choose to send them.

An agent session is a record of your work. It holds your prompts, the model's replies, every tool call with its input and output, and the files that changed. Sometimes it also holds a key that ended up in a shell command. coding.sh records all of that, so where the record lives matters.

One folder on your machine

Everything coding.sh captures goes into ~/.coding.sh. Set CODING_SH_HOME to put it somewhere else. Sessions and events go into a SQLite index, index.db, through Node's built-in node:sqlite. Large prompts and tool output go into blobs/, compressed with zstd.

The viewer runs from the same CLI. It binds to 127.0.0.1 and asks for the token in the URL it prints.

Nothing is sent unless you ask

With no sinks configured, no session data leaves your machine. The one default network request is a daily update check: a GET to api.github.com, falling back to registry.npmjs.org. Set CODING_SH_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 or [update] check = false to turn it off.

The hook that agents run writes the raw payload to ~/.coding.sh/spool with mode 600 and exits. It does no network work.

To send events somewhere else, add a sink. A sink sends metadata unless you set mode = "full": ids, timestamps, kinds, durations, token counts and short labels. Prompts, code and tool output stay on your machine.

config.toml 
# ~/.coding.sh/config.toml
[[sinks]]
kind = "otlp"                      # or "http"
endpoint = "http://localhost:4318"
mode = "metadata"                  # default; "full" sends content

Secrets are redacted before they are written

Redaction runs at ingest, before anything reaches the index, the blobs or a sink. The built-in rules catch private keys, vendor API keys and tokens, JWTs, and bearer and basic auth.

Redaction keeps a secret out of the store, but the agent and its model provider still saw it. So a session that held a vendor token gets the secret:exposed tag, and this lists the sessions whose credentials to rotate:

shell 
coding.sh sessions --flag secret:exposed

If a value got past redaction, coding.sh purge --literal leaked.txt replaces every stored copy with [redacted:purged].

A cloned repo cannot widen it

A .coding.sh/config.toml inside a repository can add redaction rules or switch capture to metadata mode. It cannot add sinks or move the store. Opening a repository you cloned does not send your sessions anywhere.

Read more

  • Storage, sinks and privacy lists everything that is captured and every setting that changes it.
  • Concepts defines the words coding.sh uses: sessions, events, flags and the rest.

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