You clicked "don't ask again". Your password went to GitHub.
If you use an AI coding agent, read this before your next commit 👇
Researchers at Apiiro looked at a small settings file that Claude Code keeps in your project, .claude/settings.local.json. Every time you click "Yes, and don't ask again", the agent saves that command there so it does not ask you next time.
The problem: if the command had a password or a token in it, the file now holds that password in plain text. And people push the file to GitHub.
Apiiro found 104,185 copies of the file in public repos. 1,122 of them held at least one secret. Counting older versions and forks, 2,539 secrets across 1,994 repos. Among them: 379 database passwords, 122 Supabase service-role keys, 43 SSH logins, 23 AWS keys. Half of the leaky files had been sitting there for at least 217 days.
The worst part for me: the two most popular secret scanners together still missed 215 of those files. Your "we have scanning" may not be catching this.
Anthropic's head of Claude Code replied that the tool adds the file to git's ignore list on creation, and that they are looking at adding secret scanning. Either way, the file is on GitHub now.
Do this today, 10 minutes:
- Search your repos, including history, for
.claude/settings.local.json and .claude/settings.json. - If a secret was ever in there, rotate it first. Deleting the file does not delete the history.
- Add the file to your project's own
.gitignore, not only your machine's. - Stop typing passwords into commands. Use a variable like
$DB_URL. - Approve patterns like
npm run:*, not one-off commands with keys in them.
Same rule for .cursor/ and the rest. Treat agent folders like .env files.
The agent saved you one click. Make sure it did not cost you your database.
