Privacy: what is kept and where
Everything stays on your computer, unless you set up a remote backend. There's no telemetry. TuxAide only goes online when you run tuxaide update (to GitHub) or download a model (from Ollama).
What is sent to the model
Your question; with a follow-up, the last 3 exchanges; with ?, the failed command line, its exit code and the error it printed when re-run; with system_context on, a one-line description of your system (tuxaide system shows it). With the default setup, “the model” is Ollama on your own computer.
What is never sent
TuxAide only sees a line when the shell can't find its first word as a command, and only sends it if it reads like a question (how it knows). Your normal commands never reach it.
A password typed at the prompt by mistake isn't a question: you get the normal “command not found”, nothing goes to a model and TuxAide writes nothing to disk. Your shell's own history keeps the line, as it would without TuxAide. If a line is taken as a question, it's sent and kept as in the table below — tuxaide new and tuxaide cache clear remove it.
What is kept, and how to delete it
| What | Where | How to delete |
|---|---|---|
| Settings | ~/.config/tuxaide/config.json | tuxaide config reset <key> |
| Your last 20 questions and the start of each answer (for follow-ups) | ~/.config/tuxaide/history.json — only you can read it | tuxaide new |
| Cached answers (30 days) | ~/.config/tuxaide/cache/ | tuxaide cache clear |
Output of tuxaide run | ~/.config/tuxaide/session.json — only you can read it | rm ~/.config/tuxaide/session.json |
| Timings and the first 80 characters of each question | ~/.config/tuxaide/logs/perf.log | rm ~/.config/tuxaide/logs/perf.log |
| Man-page index (Smart RAG) | ~/.config/tuxaide/vectordb/ | tuxaide mode llm, then delete the folder |
The last command line and its exit code (for ?) | your shell's memory — never on disk | closing the terminal |
tuxaide uninstall removes all of it.
What TuxAide never does
- Run a command on its own. Commands go on your prompt; you press Enter. The one exception is
?re-running your last command to read its error — read-only commands without asking, anything else only after y. - Store an API key. Keys are read from an environment variable.
- Check for updates in the background.