A pasted secret is a burned secret
Chat transcripts persist outside your security boundary. Claude Code stores every session as plaintext JSONL on disk, synced wherever your home folder syncs. Commits co-authored by a coding agent leak secrets at about twice the baseline rate. The window is not private because it feels private.
Where it bit
Four real tokens pasted into an AI chat while debugging, two of them twice. Three were rotatable. One was not: a legacy API app the provider no longer issues, so rotating it means losing the capability for good. The sharper lesson was not "do not paste," it was: know which of your credentials are replaceable before you leak one.
The practice
Refer to secrets by env-var name in chat, never by value. Treat anything pasted as compromised and rotate. Keep an inventory with a column for "re-issuable." Shorten session retention with cleanupPeriodDays and deny .env reads in the agent's permissions.
Check it
grep -rlE "sk_live_|AKIA[A-Z0-9]{16}|ghp_[A-Za-z0-9]{36}" ~/.claude/projects/ 2>/dev/null | wc -lGet this check as a script you can run tonight
What to do with this
If you run a business on something AI built and the checks came back with more than you expected, that is worth a conversation.
We do a free 30-minute Health Check for service businesses that want to know exactly where their biggest leaks are. No slide deck. No pitch. We ask questions, find the gaps, and tell you what we see. If there is no obvious fix, we will tell you that too.
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