Local Storage & Data Privacy

Caide is fundamentally engineered as a local-first application. Unlike cloud-hosted AI coding assistants that upload your entire workspace to proprietary servers, Caide stores all state strictly on your local disk.

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What Lives on Your Machine

All application state is stored locally inside your OS user data directory (~/.config/caide or ~/.caide):

Data Type	Storage Engine	Purpose
Threads & Turns	SQLite via Drizzle ORM	Conversation history, user prompts, assistant turns, token counts
Goal Trees	SQLite via Drizzle ORM	High-level goal tracking, sub-tasks, and execution checklists
Git Checkpoints	Embedded Git worktree	Point-in-time snapshots for 1-click rollback after any turn
API Keys & Secrets	OS safeStorage / Keychain	AES-256 encrypted provider keys and tokens
Project Configurations	JSON in .caide/	Project-level framework settings, dev-server ports, and rules

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Context Compaction & Memory

As chat conversations grow, Caide employs an intelligent context compaction algorithm:

• When a thread approaches the model's context window limit, Caide identifies completed turns and summarizes intermediate reasoning steps into dense, structured checkpoints.
• Critical architectural decisions, file paths, and current goals are preserved.
• Unnecessary verbose tool outputs (e.g. 500 lines of build logs) are compacted into a single status confirmation, saving tokens and maintaining model reasoning sharpness.

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Zero Telemetry Guarantee

• Caide contains zero third-party analytics trackers (no PostHog, Mixpanel, or Google Analytics).
• Your source code is never used to train models.
• Network requests leave your machine only when explicitly making API calls to your configured model provider or when deploying to your chosen hosting service (Vercel / GitHub).