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The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

akshaychugh.xyz

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Re: The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

#71

Post by elAhmo »

andrewqu wrote: post #39

Engineer at Vercel here who worked on the plugin! We have been super heads down to the initial versions of the plugin and constantly improving it. Always super happy to hear feedback and track the changes on GitHub. I want to address the notes here: The plugin is always on, once installed on an agent harness. We do not want to limit to only detected Vecel project, because we also want to help with greenfield projects…

> The plugin is always on, once installed on an agent harness. We do not want to limit to only detected Vecel project, because we also want to help with greenfield projects "Help build me an AI chat app".

Don't you see a problem if everyone took this approach?

Re: The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

#72

Post by TheTaytay »

embedding-shape wrote: post #53
staplers wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

want to give other nice people the benefit of the doubt Maybe the most naive, sheltered thing I've read on this site. If we were talking about an individual OSS maintainer, sure, that's possible. But large corporations have been doing the opposite for as long as they've existed and there's evidence presented to that fact nearly everyday.

> Maybe the most naive, sheltered thing I've read on this site You must be new then, welcome :) I'm not saying I never believe any individuals in a company intentionally do bad stuff, just that I require evidence of it being intention before I assume it to be intentional. Personally I don't think that's naive, and it is based on ~30-40 years of real world life experience, but I guess I'm ultimately happy that not eve…

Just came to say (since the person you’re responding to has a different view of the world) that I agree with you that this is both a more accurate, and easier way to live. Assuming malice as the default sounds like a recipe for being very, very unhappy.

Re: The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

#73

Post by TheTaytay »

jp57 wrote: post #70

AI tools right now remind me of the old days of single-user PC/Mac operating systems without protected memory or preemptive multitasking. You could read any file, write directly to video memory, load machine code into the heap and then jump to it, etc.

Well said! We built in protections to multi-user and single user systems, but now we seem to be relearning them…your agent is not “you” and should probably not run as the same user with the same default permissions as “you”

Re: The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

#74

Post by yakuphanycl »

michiosw wrote: post #14

This is a broader pattern I keep seeing with agent plugins/extensions — the permission model is "all or nothing." Once you install a plugin, it gets full context on every session, every prompt. Compare this to how we think about OAuth scopes or container sandboxing — you'd never ship a CI integration that gets read access to every repo in your org just because it needs to lint one. But that's essentially what's happe…

[flagged]

Re: The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

#75

Post by anematode »

andrewqu wrote: post #39

Engineer at Vercel here who worked on the plugin! We have been super heads down to the initial versions of the plugin and constantly improving it. Always super happy to hear feedback and track the changes on GitHub. I want to address the notes here: The plugin is always on, once installed on an agent harness. We do not want to limit to only detected Vecel project, because we also want to help with greenfield projects…

Abysmal response.

Re: The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

#76

Post by WhyNotHugo »

jp57 wrote: post #70

AI tools right now remind me of the old days of single-user PC/Mac operating systems without protected memory or preemptive multitasking. You could read any file, write directly to video memory, load machine code into the heap and then jump to it, etc.

That’s a very accurate analogy.

What’s amazing is that during the last decade, containers and microvms have had huge impact on the ecosystem. Yet a huge amount of devs seem to just YOLO it and run agents in their host with full ambient capabilities.

Re: The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

#77

Post by masfuerte »

TheTaytay wrote: post #72
embedding-shape wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe the most naive, sheltered thing I've read on this site You must be new then, welcome :) I'm not saying I never believe any individuals in a company intentionally do bad stuff, just that I require evidence of it being intention before I assume it to be intentional. Personally I don't think that's naive, and it is based on ~30-40 years of real world life experience, but I guess I'm ultimately happy that not eve…

Just came to say (since the person you’re responding to has a different view of the world) that I agree with you that this is both a more accurate, and easier way to live. Assuming malice as the default sounds like a recipe for being very, very unhappy.

This attitude of ignoring what is true in favour of what makes you happy is exactly how corporations made up of mostly good people can do bad things.

Re: The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

#78

Post by TheTaytay »

andrewqu wrote: post #39

Engineer at Vercel here who worked on the plugin! We have been super heads down to the initial versions of the plugin and constantly improving it. Always super happy to hear feedback and track the changes on GitHub. I want to address the notes here: The plugin is always on, once installed on an agent harness. We do not want to limit to only detected Vecel project, because we also want to help with greenfield projects…

I appreciate the response, but I don’t think you realize what people are upset about. This is a security issue, not just a privacy issue.

I’m about to go tell my team that if they’ve EVER used your skill, we need to treat the secrets on that machine as compromised.

Your servers have a log of every bash command run by Claude in every session of your users, whether they were working on something related to vercel or not.

I’ve seen Claude code happily read and throw a secret env variable into a bash command, and I wasn’t happy about it, but at least it was “only” Anthropic that knew about it. But now it sounds like Vercel telemetry servers might know about it too.

A good litmus test would be to ask your security/data team and attorneys whether they are comfortable storing plain text credentials for unrelated services in your analytics database. They will probably look afraid before you get to the part where you clarify that the users in question didn’t consent to it, didn’t know about it, and might not even be your customer.

Re: The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

#79

Post by wswope »

staindk wrote: post #61
wswope wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cmon now — I’m a rabid privacy nut but this is unfair given the context of: > Prompt telemetry is opt-in and off by default. The hook asks once; if you don't answer, session-end cleanup marks it as disabled. We don't collect prompt text unless you explicitly say yes. The UUID part is just one accessory layer, and something plenty of other players in the ecosystem don’t bother to stick to. Feels like actually botherin…

But your bash history is logged to vercel by default. The amount of sensitive data (PII, secrets, ...) piped via bash makes this a big issue.

Ah jeez, I was missing that detail. Yeah that’s messed up.

I skimmed by the “what gets sent” table and thought the bash telemetry was gated by the prompt-related opt-in behavior. Thanks for the correction!

Re: The Vercel plugin on Claude Code wants to read your prompts

#80

Post by akshay2603 »

andrewqu wrote: post #64
akshay2603 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here, ty for your response. Few reflections: 1. Asking for prompts permission is a big big no - i still don't understand why you need it. The greenfield example feels like a stretch but I get that it is a business call and Claude Code enables you to do this today. I am just more pissed with them here. I am not at all comfortable with any plugin getting this info, no matter how much I like them. 2. The way you ask…

For sure, I can see from your perspective how some of the measures we took were a little aggressive. And we're currently working on making it more explicit. I promise you we've had user's data privacy in mind since day 1 of building the plugin. Everything we collect is only used to improve the Vercel plugin, eg: seeing when skills are being triggered too often, when certain skills are not useful, when certain context…

I understand but nobody's asking for zero instrumentation.

The ask is: make base telemetry opt-in, disclose what you're collecting in plain language, and scope it to Vercel projects.

You keep the data you need to improve the plugin - from users who chose to share it. Everything else is what's making people uncomfortable in this thread.

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