What PromptDust is

Modern AI tools keep records. Claude Code writes a full transcript of every session to disk. The ChatGPT and Claude desktop apps cache months of conversation. Aider writes your chat history straight into the git repo you are working in. Cursor, Copilot, Ollama, and dozens of others each persist prompts, answers, and pasted keys to local files, usually in plain text, in places you never chose and mostly do not know about.

PromptDust makes that invisible footprint visible. It answers two questions:

1. What AI data is sitting on my machine?
2. What is making it more exposed than it needs to be?

It reads the disk, not the network. It lists every AI tool it knows about, every place each one stores data, and scores how exposed each store is. Then it stops. What you clean up, and when, is your call.

What it is not

PromptDust fills a specific gap, so it helps to be clear about what it does not try to be.

• It is not a secret scanner like Gitleaks or TruffleHog. Those match secrets inside file contents. PromptDust maps where AI data lives, by location and kind, and never reads your content.
• It is not a DLP or egress tool. Those stop data going to a model. PromptDust looks at what a model’s tooling left behind on your disk.
• It is not a cleaner. It never deletes, moves, or edits anything.
• It is not a security score. It never tells you that you are safe, secure, or clean.

What it is: a local, read-only, cross-tool footprint mapper for one machine, with an exposure analysis no existing tool provides.

The four principles

These are not aspirations. Each one is enforced by tests and continuous-integration guards in the open-source engine, so a change that breaks one fails the build.

1. Read-only. The tool never creates, modifies, moves, or deletes a file it scans. Ever.
2. Local-only. A scan makes zero network calls. Nothing you match or measure touches the network. Anything the app ever sends is opt-in, off by default, and never carries your content.
3. Inventory, not a verdict. It reports what is present and why it might matter. It never claims you are safe or clean.
4. Metadata-only. It records existence, size, timestamps, and structural facts like a line count. It does not read, print, or store the contents of your conversations.

Where to go next

• New here? Quickstart gets you a first scan in about a minute.
• Want the full picture of a scan? Reading your results explains exposure levels and amplifiers.
• Deciding whether to trust it? Privacy and threat model is the honest version.
• Curious which tools it maps? Browse the catalog.