Privacy & Security questions

[smolcompute]

Hi @danielmiessler & the PAI community.
Thanks again for making PAI available.

On the privacy front, I'm curious to know what parts of PAI you version control and push to a private Github repo. I saw your .gitingore file of course, and the recommendations to put secrets in an external .env file.
But it seems PAI will inevitably be full on private information about your life. For example the context folder ... Do you also exclude it and back it up independently with an end-to-end encrypted service ?

Do you only push the code-y parts of PAI to a private github repo? Like the hooks and non-sensitive CLAUDE.md files ?

Do you also exclude ? :

• .claude/shell-snapshots
• .claude/settings
• .claude/.mcp.json
• .codex/sessions etc.

I'm also curious about the permission-scope you give Claude Code. From the docs, it seems you've made PAI_HOME="$HOME" ? Do you then start Claude Code from your home folder with permission to write to that whole folder ?

Thanks!
Leo.

[danielmiessler]

Great points here. My answer is that I use PAI inside of all my different directories. But the user submit hook is what loads the context files. The PAI_HOME is just where I have most of my settings where it reads from. This is pretty much my actual install. I try to keep it as close as possible so that the project is regularly updated in a way that I know will work for people.