Ask HN: Do you know what data your AI coding agent sends to the cloud?
The article discusses concerns about data privacy when using AI coding agents. Users express trust in the tools but remain cautious about sensitive information being sent to the cloud. There are policies in place at some workplaces to restrict sensitive data to on-premises models.
- ▪Users generally do not send sensitive information to AI coding agents.
- ▪Some workplaces have policies restricting sensitive data to on-premises models.
- ▪There is no evidence of cloud providers misusing chat history beyond storage.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 2,488 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48179203 |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 13:02:51 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T13:09:56.462Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T13:09:56.462Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | vAAXhFGinc29 · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I trust the tool in that I don't send anything sensitive in there! Unless I built it, I assume it's going somewhere.We have a policy at work around this where our most sensitive data can only be passed to on prem models.That being said, I have no evidence of anything going to the cloud or frontier providers doing anything with chat history other than storing it for later.Self-hosted + custom harness for anything I don't want getting out at all.
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.